U.S. Continues To Pump Billions Into International Drug War

United States taxpayers continue to fund a destructive and deadly drug war in low- and middle-income countries across the world, with almost $13 billion allocated to counternarcotics efforts since 2015, details a new analysis.

A joint report, “A World of Harm,” released Dec. 4 by Harm Reduction International and the Drug Policy Alliance reveals the extent of the funding dispensed from various U.S. government departments to militarized anti-drugs efforts in countries such as Mexico, Colombia and the Philippines. Some of the money comes from streams which are meant to aid poverty reduction projects, the report shows.

The overall funding since 2015 is far greater than the amount spent by the U.S. on primary education or water supply and sanitation in the Global South, according to the report’s analysis. Campaigners have called for a reorientation of the finances toward evidence-based health responses to reduce drug dependency and thus lessen the demand for drugs.

“Our national budgets are value statements from our governments, they are telling us exactly what they think is important,” Colleen Daniels, deputy director of Harm Reduction International, said at the launch of the report on Zoom. U.S. investment in drug control in Latin America, where the majority of the funding goes, has fueled outward migration, hindered economic development and created political instability, she added.

President-elect Donald Trump has sent mixed messages on his proposed drug policy for when he retakes office, but $1 billion has already been requested by the outgoing administration for international counternarcotics activities, led by the Drug Enforcement Agency (DEA) and the State Department’s Bureau of International Narcotics and Law Enforcement, in 2025.

Trump’s abiding argument, however, has been that the blame for U.S. overdose deaths lies with Mexican trafficking groups, foreign governments and the Biden administration’s border policy.

“The real truth is that Americans are dying because American politicians and decision-makers are pushing death-making policies that are making our drug supply more toxic,” said Kassandra Frederique, executive director of the Drug Policy Alliance.

The U.S. has been increasingly classifying drug control spending as official development assistance (ODA), for reasons which remain unclear. Of a total of almost $1 billion in narcotics control development aid money over the past decade, at least $9 million has been allocated to countries which punish some drug-related convictions with the death penalty, including Indonesia, Iraq, Laos, Malaysia, Myanmar and Thailand. In 2021, when Indonesia sentenced at least 89 people to death over drug-related convictions, the country received $1 million in ODA funds and much more through other streams.

Across the world, the DEA has some 93 offices in 69 countries. “Receiving U.S. aid is tied to following prohibitionist and punitive approaches to drugs,” said Claire Provost, a consultant for Harm Reduction International. “You see aid spending being spent instead on things like stipends for DEA officers, shredders, satellite phones [and] bulletproof vests.”

Profit-making companies are the largest beneficiary of these funds, but many of the financial records for the spending are subject to redactions that render parts of documents unintelligible, Provost added. Or details are simply not stated — such as the specific U.S. agencies which were involved in training and advising their Mexican counterparts in 2023, using $13 million in foreign aid funding.

Since 1971, the U.S. has spent more than $1 trillion on the War on Drugs, through a law enforcement-focused approach that has fueled mass incarceration domestically and abroad. “This has continued despite growing evidence that such approaches don’t work to achieve their stated aims (ending drug use and sales) while having devastating effects on rights and health, including mass criminalization, disease transmission, repression and displacement,” the report said.

“There have been critical incidents in Mexico, Honduras, Colombia and Haiti involving DEA-supported foreign law enforcement units … [and] civilian deaths, corruption and compromised intelligence,” a 2023 report commissioned by the DEA conceded.

The new report comes after human rights groups’ warnings that hundreds of millions worth of U.S. foreign aid to the Philippines, during former president Rodrigo Duterte’s deadly crackdown on people suspected of using or selling drugs, could be tantamount to supporting “mass unlawful violence.” There were reportedly as many as 30,000 extrajudicial killings, with the victims mostly poor men. Duterte, who had urged the public to kill people addicted to drugs, now faces an international criminal court investigation for crimes against humanity.

Millions in U.S. aid has supported “forced rehabilitation” of people who use drugs in the Philippines amid efforts to create “drug-free communities,” the report said. Sterile injecting equipment is illegal in the country, and some 29 percent of people who inject drugs have HIV, following the highest increases in the region since 2010.

“The war on drugs persists in the Philippines,” said Myra Mabilin, from drug policy reform nonprofit NoBox Philippines, who helped produce the report. The country’s government, she emphasized, is still on a “relentless and damaging pursuit of a drug-free Philippines.”

Consistent U.S. government funding of the drug war in countries that still have the death penalty for drug charges “does not seem to fit into our human rights framework at all,” Daniels said. “This is an egregious and inappropriate use of aid funding and taxpayer money that people should be aware of.”