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President Donald Trump issued an executive order designating fentanyl as a “weapon of mass destruction” on Monday, in the latest escalation of his administration’s supposed campaign against drug trafficking.
“[T]he potential for fentanyl to be weaponized for concentrated, large-scale terror attacks by organized adversaries is a serious threat to the United States,” the order says. It directs the government to investigate and prosecute those involved in the illicit fentanyl trade.
In a press conference announcing the declaration, Trump falsely claimed that “two to three hundred thousand people die every year” from the drug — a wildly inflated number, with the true figure being in the tens of thousands per year.
“There’s no doubt that America’s adversaries are trafficking fentanyl into the United States, in part because they want to kill Americans,” Trump went on.
It’s unclear what the immediate impacts of the order will be. However, the Trump administration has been using its supposed campaign against the drug trade as a pretext for crackdowns at the U.S.-Mexico border as well as military escalation in Latin America.
Indeed, Trump said the drugs are “a direct military threat” when signing the order on Monday. Experts have said that the declaration is bogus, based on no evidence and designed to be a flashy move that will do nothing to actually combat issues stemming from drugs.
Experts have also noted that the vessels currently targeted by the administration’s illegal boat strike campaign aren’t moving fentanyl to the U.S. Rather, most of them are actually transporting cocaine, and aren’t headed to the U.S. at all, but Europe. Researchers say fentanyl enters the U.S. through Mexico almost exclusively — and the vast majority of those apprehended for smuggling from the southern border are U.S. citizens, according to an analysis by the American Immigration Council this year.
Trump’s designation invokes the George W. Bush administration’s declaration of weapons of mass destruction in Iraq in 2002, as a legal excuse for the U.S.’s disastrous invasion. There was no evidence of this claim, both from outside inspectors and from the administration’s own intelligence, but the Bush Administration pressed on anyway, waging an invasion and associated wars that would go on to kill millions of people over the next decades.
Analysts have previously drawn parallels between the Trump administration’s boat strike operation and the “War on Terror,” pointing out the disconnect between officials’ stated reason for the strikes and their true motives.
Indeed, the declaration comes as the Trump administration has been escalating its illegal and unprovoked military campaign against Venezuela and civilians in vessels near the country. Trump has also repeatedly threatened to begin land strikes in Venezuela, and said last week that such strikes are starting soon.
Trump administration officials have claimed that they are targeting “narco-terrorists” in their boat strike campaign, to supposedly protect Americans from illicit drugs. However, critics have pointed out that Trump’s other actions belie his true intentions of pursuing a reckless regime change operation.
Indeed, Trump has pardoned dozens of people related to the illicit drug trade, while cutting hundreds of millions from programs to treat addiction and overdoses and nearly $1 trillion from Medicaid, one of the biggest funders of addiction treatment in the country.
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