Trump declares fentanyl as weapon of mass destruction to tackle drug crisis

By Courtney Subramanian

 

President Donald Trump said he was classifying fentanyl as a “weapon of mass destruction” in his latest push to ratchet up pressure on Latin America over drug trafficking. 

“I’m taking one more step to protect Americans from the scourge of deadly fentanyl flooding into our country,” Trump said Monday during an event at the White House. “With this historic executive order I will sign today we’re formally classifying fentanyl as a weapon of mass destruction, which is what it is.”

 

The Trump administration weighed a similar designation in the president’s first term, and allies have argued that doing so would allow the Department of Homeland Security to access money that had been appropriated for detecting and eliminating weapons of mass destruction. The text of Trump’s executive order was not immediately available.

 

 

The move comes as Trump has cited fentanyl deaths to justify a series of attacks against boats in international waters that the Pentagon says were being used to smuggle drugs, part of a campaign that has focused largely on encouraging Venezuela’s Nicolas Maduro to give up power. Trump has vowed to expand the attacks to drug production targets on land.

 

“We’re going to start hitting them on land, which is a lot easier to do, frankly, but these are a direct military threat to the United States of America,” Trump said. 

 

Trump border czar Tom Homan, who attended the event, told Axios in October the administration had been discussing the WMD idea for at least six months. US Representative Lauren Boebert, a Colorado Republican close to the White House, introduced a bill earlier this year that would require the Department of Homeland Security’s Countering Weapons of Mass Destruction Office to classify the drug as under its purview.

 

The move comes as the president is considering a move to reclassify marijuana as a less dangerous drug, rallying cannabis stocks.