This paper reflects on the justifications and impacts of militarism in contemporary global narcotic governance, focusing on the interrelated questions on how state leaders and elites justify state-perpetrated violence by invoking seemingly anti-violence concepts such as peace, security, human rights, justice, democracy, and development, and how drug war perpetrators justify their actions within and outside the state apparatus. The paper demonstrates that the war-on-drugs approach institutionalizes death and militarism as the default state policy, which represses marginalized groups based on material endowments, race, and gender, while highlighting the mechanisms of justification and implementation of a war on drugs policy approach. The paper maintains that state leaders actualize a war-on-drugs approach through intensified state violence and the perpetration of an impunity culture that protects state agents from any sort of legal prosecution for their human rights abuses.