Carrying out and enforcing immoral laws makes you as much of a criminal as anybody.
The police state doesn't carry out showy public executions like the cartels do, but they have ruined many people's lives for no good reason and they have put plenty of otherwise innocent people in a grave.
And guess what? The American people pay for both sides. They pay for the cartels and they pay for the police state.
If the war on drugs never existed there wouldn't be any cartels in the first place. It's pure idiocy compounded with greed and profiteering on other people's misery.
You can't have the one of the highest percentage of the population in prison and call yourself a free country. It's bold faced contradiction. The USA beats out Turkmenistan FFS.
> The war on drugs is not a war that soldiers fight
Debatable. The police men / DEA involved probably feel like soldiers sometimes. The drug lords and governments in south america certainly have soldiers involved.
They're being trained to think of themselves as soldiers. This will inevitably lead to them being soldiers, and that eventually ends in bog-standard straightforward war, indistinguishable from any waged by "real" soldiers.
Most soldiers throughout history were not career soldiers or warriors. Most are people brought into the conflict without any intent to be a soldier before whatever brought them in.
There are a lot of decapitations and mass graves for something that isn't a war. If the people fighting aren't soldiers, what are they?