25A041 Venezuelan Coke by Jim Davies, 10/14/2025

With nary a declaration of war, the President has used the US Navy to sink several small cargo ships heading North from Venezuela, carrying supplies of cocaine (so his agents assure him) to the US market. This is murder on the high seas as well as an interference with free trade, and for all that he's a vast improvement on his predecessor, that is wrong.

In the coming zero government society, no such thing will occur. If US buyers are so foolish as to damage or destroy their own lives by ingesting cocaine, it's their own funeral. Families and friends will try to dissuade them, but ultimately freedom means responsibility. Their lives belong exclusively to them, and the coke market is no business of government.

Why, then, has the Prez had the Navy commit these murders? - for sure it's not to help drug addicts, for reducing supply will only raise its price and so make the damage to their lives even more miserable; in addition if he really wanted to cut the ground from under the wealthy drug cartels in Venezuela, he could do it easily by having Congress repeal the laws prohibiting the drugs. He's not strong on economics, but I can't believe he doesn't know that perfectly well.

So the reason must lie elsewhere, and two possibilities come to mind: (a) he dislikes President Maduro and his socialism and is stirring up an excuse to bring about a revolution or "régime change" and/or (b) he wants to bring the huge oil reserves in Venezuela under US control.

I share the desire in (a), but it's no business of the FedGov to bring it about. That's for the unfortunate people of Venezuela to arrange. As for (b), this country is self-sufficient in oil and if US oil companies wish to get some from Venezuelan producers so as to balance their supply of the different qualities of oil to match their refining equipment, they surely know how to go about buying it. Neither reason or motive, therefore, is valid.

Can there be a third motive? Possibly: the Russian government is busy trying to form a trading bloc called BRICS+, to break the monopoly of the US Dollar as a reserve currency. To bring Venezuela and its oil in to that bloc would be a nice feather in Putin's cap, and Trump may be acting to impede that. It's a stretch, but I can't think of any other.

Whatever his motive or excuse, after government here has evaporated for want of anyone to work for it, there will be no enforcible law to prevent anyone producing and selling cocaine inside the US, to the limited extent that anyone can make a worthwhile profit at the low prices that will prevail.

Whether the low prices will cause coke usage (and OD deaths) to rise remains to be seen, though its price sensitivity has proven to be very low; and whether any foreign producer (Venezuelan or other) would find it profitable to ship supplies here is iffier yet. So the problem, like government itself, will disappear.