America’s Drug Denial Is Killing Our Children

www.americanthinker.com

America should be celebrating.

A dictator brought down.

A narco-terrorist removed from power.

A man accused of poisoning entire regions through organized drug trafficking brought to justice alive, in a courtroom, instead of buried at sea after a raid.

That is what the capture of Nicolás Maduro represents — a rare moment of moral clarity in a world that too often shrugs at drug-fueled devastation.

We celebrated when Gaddafi fell.

We celebrated when Osama bin Laden was found and taken out.

Maduro’s downfall should have been no different.

Instead, there is unrest. Arguments that his removal is somehow cruel, destabilizing, or unjust — as if the greater injustice were not the decades of addiction, violence, and death that followed in the wake of the drug networks he protected and profited from.

Before we argue about geopolitics or international law, let me introduce you to the people Maduro has been hurting.

It’s early evening on a blustery winter day when the phone rings. The caller ID flashes a county name before cutting off. Your heart drops into your stomach.

This is the call you’ve been waiting for.

The one you’ve been dreading for years.

The call from the medical examiner telling you your child is dead.

Instead, the voice on the other end says she’s calling from the county jail. Your son has been arrested for heroin possession.

And in that moment, you feel relief.

“Wait — he’s in jail?” the mother says, her voice shaking. “He isn’t dead? I thought you were calling from the medical examiner.”

She exhales — a sigh of relief — then catches herself.

“I’m sorry,” she says. “You must think I’m a horrible mother.”

I never did.

For more than fourteen years, I was the woman making those calls from inside the Allegheny County Jail in Pittsburgh. I could hear it before the parents spoke — the silence on the line, the breath held too long, the moment they realized what kind of call this was.

Many told me they slept with their phones beside them, volume turned all the way up, terrified they would miss the call that told them it was finally over.

In those moments I was the last voice standing between uncertainty and confirmation of their worst fear.

Until you have felt your heart race as you steady yourself before answering an unknown call, debates about drug policy remain irrelevant. In that moment — when you are deciding whether to sit down or fall — denial stops being imaginary.

It resurfaces later in public discourse, when cartel smuggling operations are rhetorically softened as something harmless. We are told the vessels moving drugs into the United States are “just fishermen.”

They are not.

Cartel smuggling boats exist to move narcotics, evade law enforcement, and sustain addiction at scale. Pretending otherwise is not confusion.

It is deliberate blindness.

And deliberate blindness kills.

During my years at the jail, I learned to predict when a parent would assume the worst based solely on their child’s arrest history. The longer the record, the more certain the family was that time was running out.

Parents begged me to explain what they had done wrong — which rule they failed to enforce, which warning sign they missed. I never had an answer that satisfied them, because the truth is brutal: many of those parents did everything right.

What they could not control was access.

One case still follows me.

A mother answered the phone certain her daughter was already gone. The young woman was in her early thirties — once strikingly beautiful, her appearance steadily erased by drugs. She told me she couldn’t stay clean. She was trapped in an abusive relationship, and it was the man she loved who had first introduced her to heroin.

Her booking photos told the story more clearly than words ever could. The first was a pretty picture. The ones that followed, taken over just a few months, showed her disappearing. By the last one, she was unrecognizable. Drugs had taken her from a natural beauty to hollowed cheeks, sunken eyes, and brown, missing teeth. From beautiful to tragic.

I printed the nearly dozen mugshots and slipped them under her cell door. They weren’t meant to shame her. They were evidence.

We stood on opposite sides of the glass. I placed my hand against it, and she met it with her own.

A month later, she was gone.

Heroin does not appear magically in suburban bedrooms or rural bathrooms. It arrives through organized networks, smuggling routes, and cartel operations that depend on infrastructure and political protection.

The capture of Maduro made that impossible to deny. Federal indictments describe him as a central node in an international narcotics operation — proof that some governments do not merely fail to stop the drug trade.

They facilitate it.

When we refuse to dismantle those systems decisively, we are not choosing empathy. We are choosing to accept a certain level of death.

Parents often begged me to have judges force their children into rehab — a last, desperate attempt to save a life. What few policymakers are willing to say out loud is that forced treatment can increase overdose risk. After periods of abstinence, tolerance drops. The same amount of heroin that once barely registered can become fatal.

What is meant to be an intervention can instead become a bridge between incarceration and a funeral.

The intention is compassion.

The outcome is sometimes a burial.

That reality makes cartel disruption more urgent, not less. When supply remains cheap, plentiful, and potent, relapse becomes lethal.

This is not about punishing addicts.

It is about refusing to protect the supply chains that profit from their destruction.

Cartels are not fishermen.

Smuggling boats are not benign commerce.

And denial is not concern.

Every time we delay decisive action because the truth is uncomfortable, more parents learn what it feels like to be relieved their child is alive — even if that relief comes from a jail cell.

Many will still lose them anyway.

Until we are willing to confront cartel infrastructure honestly — without euphemisms, excuses, or performative outrage — the phone will keep ringing.

And too often, it will be the call no parent survives.

Kelly Rae Robertson is a licensed professional counselor and former county jail investigator who spent more than fourteen years working with families impacted by addiction and the criminal justice system. She writes about public safety, grief, and the human cost of policy denial.

Image: Rehab Center Parus, via Wikimedia Commons // CC BY-SA 4.0 Deed