What's Packing the Trains
It's Demand, Stupid
Years ago, Hillary Clinton stated that America would not have a drug problem at the Mexican border or anywhere if there was no market for drugs in America. She was right. But instead of asking why there’s a market—why stations across America are packed with people desperate enough to board trains carrying poison—we’ve spent fifty years relentlessly attacking supply. And in attacking supply, we didn’t reduce demand. We just forced the trains to carry deadlier cargo.
The Stations We Built
The war on drugs talks endlessly about supply: interdiction, eradication, enforcement, incarceration. But Secretary Clinton identified the fundamental truth: this is a demand problem. The invisible railroad I wrote about last week doesn’t exist because cartels built it. It exists because we filled every station with people who have nowhere else to go.
The four stations we built show economic despair drives both supply and demand.
Station One: Colombian and Peruvian farmers choose coca over abject poverty because agricultural subsidies in developed nations destroyed export markets and lack of infrastructure makes it impossible to get crops to market.
Station Two: In Mexico, Guatemala, and Honduras, cartel work pays better than legitimate employment. Research on 29,000 imprisoned cartel members found 93% were previously employed—70% as farmers earning subsistence wages.
Station Three: Border towns where interdiction makes smuggling more profitable, not less.
Station Four: American communities where economic opportunity vanished—Appalachia, the Rust Belt, urban neighborhoods in Philadelphia, Baltimore, and Saint Louis.
But We Attacked Supply
But we attacked supply and made everything worse through three deadly waves.
Wave One: prescription opioids in the 1990’s. We cracked down on prescriptions.
Wave Two: In the 2000s users shifted to heroin. We responded with border enforcement.
Wave Three: 2015 - present. Enforcement made synthetic opioids more profitable. Fentanyl is fifty times more potent than heroin. One kilogram produces five hundred thousand potentially fatal doses.
The result? A 540% increase in fentanyl deaths between 2013 and 2016. In 2023, synthetic opioids killed 72,776 Americans.
We also built another death trap: mass incarceration. Former inmates overdose at rates 120 times higher than the general population. It’s more lethal than death row.
What Actually Works
Programs in Seattle and Rhode Island prove the efficacy of treatment over incarceration. Rhode Island became the first state to screen every person entering its correctional system for opioid use disorder and offer all three FDA-approved medications, methadone, buprenorphine, and naltrexone, as treatment. Post-incarceration overdose deaths dropped 61% in the first year, contributing to a 12% drop in statewide deaths.
Seattle’s Law Enforcement Assisted Diversion program (LEAD) diverted people from arrest to case management instead of jail. LEAD participants had 60% lower odds of arrest over six months, and 58% lower odds long-term.
Both programs prove the same point: provide treatment, housing, and employment support, and addiction rates fall. Rhode Island’s model could be implemented in every state. Seattle’s LEAD has been replicated in dozens of jurisdictions.
We don’t scale these programs because they require investment in treatment instead of interdiction, and because they challenge fifty years of enforcement-first orthodoxy.
The Solution: Close the Stations
The solution is closing stations through market-driven industrial policy with measurable ROI and a firm commitment to revise —or end— programs that fail to deliver expected returns. Manufacturing investment, infrastructure development, broadband deployment, education and childcare reform. Healthcare that doesn’t default to opioids. Hemispheric economic partnerships that reduce cartel recruitment and strengthen border security.
We’re not winning the war on drugs. By every metric we’re losing. We continue to use law enforcement and the military to address economic and social destruction. Comprehensive and coordinated economic and social policies are the only hope we have to reroute the trains and close the stations. Everything else is theater.