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Comment by ppollaki | Hacker News Reader

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Why do you blame this on Trump supporters? from what I saw, opponents are also rationalizing it.

The stated purpose of the tariffs is to stop the flow of fentanyl into the US (which kills over 70k Americans a year). If the economic hurt this causes to China is enough to drastically reduce the flow of fentanyl into the US then I suppose it will have accomplished its mission

I don't believe the stated purpose of the tariffs because the stated purpose (or lack thereof) from all the other new policies are nonsense

This is a genuine question because I don't know, how do tariffs stop illegal drugs from coming in?

Ok I'll bite. The de minimus rule allows any import valued under $800 to enter the USA duty free. Chinese drop shipping companies and others leverage this rule to ship millions of packages direct to consumer. Many Chinese companies split a large freight shipments into dozens of smaller shipments to avoid paying duty fees.

My understanding is, trade war stuff aside, the effect this has on customs is to overwhelm their intake facilities with small packages, thus allowing shipments of narcotics and illicit goods to make it through without much chance of getting caught. The idea is that removing this rule will force shippers to bulk ship freight and allow customs to better inspect smaller shipments.

Wouldn't the bulk freight still be largely un-inspected?

Seems like a lot of logistics companies will just offer a lot of LTL where packages will go inside shipping containers and then get reshipped via USPS after getting sorted at the private logistics warehouse near the port.

The containers will take longer to get here via ship, and everything will have to be marked with an invoice for some kind of tariff, but I don't know what else will really change.

a) You could try to use tariff's to apply pressure to the other country to get them to apply more enforcement.

b) For the specific case of removal de minimis exceptions, this could reduce shipping volume (in terms of number of individual shipments), making inspection easier/more tractable.

By conditioning the lifting of the tariffs on China stopping the fentanyl, it's really not that complicated

Gotcha, that makes sense.

> If the economic hurt this causes to China is enough to drastically reduce the flow of fentanyl into the US

What if the economic hurt this causes to China drastically increases the flow of fentanyl in the US?

Then block all trade outright with China if they show themselves willing to be so openly belligerent.

Ahahahahahahahahahahaha. As someone who works in manufacturing in the USA - we can't keep our domestic factories running, or build new ones, without trade with China. We also can't keep our hospitals running, manufacture vehicles, or a million other things without Chinese components/tools/materials.

Illegal fentanyl is already legally blocked, but somehow still gets in. This is like making drug smuggling illegal, yes, we can do that, we do that, but for some reason the drugs are still smuggled in.

> if they show themselves willing to be so openly belligerent

Why would they need to be open about it? But also: the time to do that was 30 years ago.

Pointing the gun, telling the others to drink the kool-aid.

That seems unlikely

Actually a White House spokesman said it has killed "tens of millions of Americans" [1]. They didn't say over what timeframe, but it has only been around 65 years so would have to have killed on average over 150k per year just to reach 10 million.

OD deaths have also been plummeting since mid 2023, after rising greatly during the last half of Trump's first term, and to a lesser extent during the first half of Biden's.

[1] https://www.npr.org/2025/02/02/nx-s1-5283957/fentanyl-trump-...

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