President Donald Trump has designated fentanyl — a strong opioid painkiller that is widely used in medical settings — as a weapon of mass destruction in what could be a major escalation in his administration's efforts to topple the Venezuelan government.
Speaking in the Oval Office Monday during a ceremony to award a long-dormant medal to soldiers and marines who've been deployed along the U.S.-Mexico border as part of his administration's immigration crackdown, Trump acknowledged that the medication is "very important for medicine, for anesthesia [and][various other things."
"When it's mixed with certain things, it becomes bad," he said.
The president claimed the “mixing” of fentanyl was taking place in Mexico and claimed his administration had seized “millions” of pills containing the drug in recent months. But after a long, unhinged digression about the governor of Colorado’s refusal to honor a pardon Trump purportedly issued to a former county clerk who was convicted of violating state election laws in a vain attempt to prove he won the 2020 election in that state, the president claimed Venezuela and other countries were sending the drug to American shores deliberately to kill Americans instead of to make profits and satisfy demand for the illegal narcotic.
“There's no doubt that America's adversaries are trafficking fentanyl into the United States in part because they want to kill Americans. If this were a war, that would be one of the worst wars,” Trump said.
“They've destroyed a lot of families, because when they lose a child, or even if their child is heavily addicted, you lose that family, the family will never be the same.”
He said the executive order he was signing would be “one more step to protect Americans from the scourge of deadly fentanyl flooding into our country” by designating the drug as a weapon of mass destruction, which he claimed kills up to 300,000 people each year.
The presidential directive tasks the Secretary of Defense and Attorney General with determining whether the Pentagon should provide the Justice Department with military resources for combatting fentanyl trafficking under a little-used section of U.S. law permitting the Justice Department to receive “assistance” from the military for an “emergency situation involving a weapon of mass destruction.”
It’s unclear whether Trump can legally invoke that part of the law, known as Section 282, to deal with fentanyl trafficking, but the president’s claim to designate the narcotic as a chemical weapon could be sufficient for him to do so.
U.S. law defines a “chemical weapon” as a “toxic chemical and its precursors” or a “munition or device, specifically designed to cause death or other harm through toxic properties of those toxic chemicals.”
The order also directs the Secretary of Homeland Security to use employ the department’s counter-proliferation apparatus to “identify threat networks related to fentanyl smuggling” and use “WMD and nonproliferation-related threat intelligence” to “support the full spectrum of counter-fentanyl operations.”
