On July 22, the Senate confirmed Terrance Cole as the new administrator of the Drug Enforcement Administration, by a 50-47 vote. President Donald Trump’s pick for the position, Cole has served as the secretary of public safety and homeland security for the state of Virginia, and has 28 years of past experience in law enforcement, including 22 years at the DEA.
The DEA has operated without a permanent leader since Trump took office. Trump previously appointed Derek Maltz as interim director; Maltz resigned in May and was replaced by Robert Murphy.
According to Cole’s bio on the Virginia government website, his past DEA career saw him stationed in Oklahoma, New York, Texas and Washington, DC; as well as abroad in Colombia, Afghanistan, Mexico and the Middle East. His former positions include chief of staff and executive officer at the DEA/DOJ Special Operations Division, representative to the National Security Council and chief of global operations. At the time of his retirement in 2020, he was acting regional director of Mexico, Canada and Central America.
So what can we expect from his DEA leadership? To a large extent, it’s more of the same.
“It means in the White House battle for reform on marijuana and psychedelics, the DEA will be a voice against reform and policy innovation.”
Eric Sterling, an attorney and former director of the Criminal Justice Policy Foundation, noted Cole’s long experience at the agency and commitment to the drug war.
“He’s not likely to wholly mismanage the DEA as so many of Trump’s other appointees are,” Sterling told Filter. “From the standpoint of drug policy reform however, it’s an utterly status quo appointment. It means in the White House battle for reform on marijuana and psychedelics, the DEA will be a voice against reform and policy innovation.”
The DEA, like any other large federal bureaucracy, has developed an entrenched institutional culture that no single change in leadership will shake, Sterling continued.
“Every agency develops a culture. It’s very challenging for new leaders to change that,” he said. “It’s hard to persuade people who in their training and recruitment have developed a particular worldview about the agency’s role and its method of operation. The DEA is not a high-turnover agency: Men and women who join will stay through to retirement age. You typically join because you believe in your marrow that drug traffickers are evil people and inflicting great harm on Americans, and your agency is the one that will bring them to justice.”
The DEA was formed in 1973 under President Richard Nixon, with the duty of enforcing the Controlled Substances Act. It operates both domestically and internationally, coordinating and supporting anti-drug operations with foreign governments and other institutions. The DEA collects evidence submitted into civil and criminal court proceedings related to drug charges, but doesn’t prosecute cases. DEA agents are empowered to make arrests, and to seize assets like drugs, vehicles, cash and homes. Worldwide, the DEA maintains 91 offices in 68 countries, gathering intelligence, conducting investigations and funding “counternarcotics training.”
Cole has a long track record of involvement in the DEA’s overseas presence. ProPublica described his role in the most significant United States enforcement action against a top Mexican government official. In 2019, Cole directed a team that compiled the evidence used to indict former public security minister Genaro García Luna, who served under President Felipe Calderón. García Luna was arrested in the US in 2019 on charges of accepting bribes from the Sinaloa Cartel while in office. He was convicted and sentenced to 38 years in prison.
Cole was also heavily involved in the implementation of Plan Colombia, a years-long initiative to provide billions of dollars to militarize anti-drug operations.
Cole has emphasized a portrayal of Mexico as a country of systemic corruption. “The Mexican drug cartels work hand-in-hand with corrupt Mexican government officials at high levels,” he told the far-right news site Breitbart. “If the average taxpayer had a basic understanding of how these two groups work together still—to this minute—they would be sickened.”
In a separate interview with former US Representative Mary Bono (R-CA), he described Mexican trafficking groups as terrorist organizations. “Mexico has been a failing state for years,” he said. “Now we’re seeing Mexico turn into a terror training camp similar to what we saw in the Middle East years ago.”
In Cole’s Senate testimony, as relayed by Border Report, he reiterated: “I would say a majority [of Mexico is controlled by trafficking groups] … I left DEA in 2019 from Mexico City and saw the dominance the cartels had at that time. [Jalisco New Generation] controlled 24 of the states in Mexico.” The Mexican government works “hand in hand” with these groups, he repeated. But Cole spoke of the opportunity for cooperation with Meixcan President Claudia Sheinbaum, and praised her “good faith” decision to appoint Omar Garcia Harfuch as the nation’s security minister.
Cole was also heavily involved in the implementation of Plan Colombia, a years-long initiative to provide billions of dollars to militarize anti-drug operations. He oversaw the training of elite police teams, but in 2006 one of his teams of 10 local agents was led into an ambush and massacred by a squad of Colombian military, later convicted of working for drug traffickers.
In 2011, Cole was associated with another disaster while he was working at the DEA’s Dallas office and investigating the Zetas trafficking group. Cole obtained a list of cellphone numbers being used by Zetas leadership, and forwarded it to the Special Operations Division as well DEA offices in Mexico City and Nuevo Laredo. Days later, a Zetas squad raided the town of Allende in search of the person they believed betrayed them, torturing people and massacring up to 200 men, women and children.
Following Cole’s nomination for DEA administrator, a group of former DEA officials sent an anonymous letter to lawmakers, asking them to scrutinize his role in these two incidents and his record more broadly. “There’s bad luck, but how many times do you have lightning strick twice?” asked one former DEA agent, according to CNN, though other former agents disputed the criticisms.
Tree speculated that Cole’s appointment could empower the “war with Mexico” faction of the Trump administration.
Sanho Tree, a fellow at the Institute for Policy Studies and director of its Drug Policy Project, said that Cole’s appointment reinforces the DEA’s outdated and harmful approach, which for over 50 years has failed to reduce the flow of illicit drugs.
“The DEA continues to provide not only price support for traffickers, but they also help them indirectly by getting rid of inefficient traffickers and their competition,” Tree told Filter. “It opens up an incredibly lucrative space to the remaining operatives. What they’ve done is force the drug economy to evolve on Darwinian principles—selection of the fittest. Until we talk about the economics of this problem, of why these very cheap drugs are so valuable, we’ll never get a handle on it.”
Tree also speculated that Cole’s appointment could empower the “war with Mexico” faction of the Trump administration, following its January designation of drug trafficking groups as “Foreign Terrorist Organizations.”
“They’ve been trying to drum up a war with Mexico for a while,” he said. “There are many factions that want a more muscular approach, including drone strikes. There was a war game back in February about what might happen if they used drones to go after cartels. That’s my biggest fear—that we will try again to use the ‘big stick’ approach and it backfires with all kind of unintended consequences.”
The DEA will continue to focus heavily on Latin America, with blurring lines between the “War on Drugs” and the “war on immigrants.” Tree noted that in Trump’s “Big Beautiful Bill,” signed into law earlier in July, Congress appropriated a historic $170 billion increase in funding for immigration enforcement, making ICE the nation’s largest law enforcement agency. Approximately a quarter of the DEA’s 10,000 personnel have reportedly been reassigned to immigration operations.
“To the extent this administration gets involved in Venezuela—or bashes Colombia or Mexico—it will use the excuse of drugs as the battering ram for other things, such as tariffs or immigration, that the administration wants to advance,” Tree said.
Regarding drug-related harms such as overdose, he added, “It’s impossible to argue they actually care … except as an excuse to advance other objectives.”
Beyond Latin America, Asia will also remain a DEA priority, particularly around accusations of China’s role in the trafficking of fentanyl substances and the chemicals used to make them. Tree previously spoke to Filter about how Trump’s tariff war with China will do nothing to stem the flow, but instead risks creating a new era of unpredictable substances.
“They’ll continue to play the precursor game,” he said. “My fear is we’re opening up a whole new can of worms of artificial intelligence-assisted development of drugs that are far deadlier and worse. As they try to clamp down on percursors, I think traffickers and chemists will try workarounds to arrive at the same or a similar destination. They’ll be testing it on the public and that pushes everyone up the ladder of harm and makes the market more dangerous. People yearn now for the good old days of heroin.”
Cole stated he was “not familiar” with the current, stalled process to reschedule marijuana, initiated by President Biden, but said that “it’ll be one of [my] first priorities … to see where we are.”
Among other reactions to Cole’s confirmation, NORML characterized him in a blog post as a hardliner on marijuana policy, noting his past claims that cannabis “stunts brain growth” and increases the risk of autism.
Cole stated he was “not familiar” with the current, stalled process to reschedule marijuana, initiated by President Biden, but said that “it’ll be one of [my] first priorities … to see where we are in the administrative process.”
In a statement from the Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies (MAPS), Ismail L. Ali, JD, its interim co-executive director, urged the DEA to change direction under Cole’s leadership.
“While the new Administrator has indicated that reviewing the federal proposal to reschedule cannabis will be among his priorities, he has not publicly committed to a position—a reminder that federal drug policy remains ambiguous, even as public consensus continues to move toward reform,” Ali said.
“Mr. Cole has an opportunity to lead the DEA toward an approach that meaningfully reduces the social burdens of substance use disorders, criminalization, and stigma,” he continued. “Patients, practitioners, and researchers—especially those working to address mental health and addiction—cannot afford another era of indecision cloaked in bureaucratic process.”
Photograph of Cole via government of Virginia
