Trump to declare 'illicit' fentanyl as 'weapon of mass destruction' per draft EO | Hacker News Reader

Trump to declare 'illicit' fentanyl as 'weapon of mass destruction' per draft EO

thehandbasket.co

39 pointsanigbrowl34 comments

When words can mean anything, they mean nothing.

Sounds like something that aims to to unlock the ability to use the military to go after the cartels on Mexican territory.

More importantly, its a tool to paint the fact that fentanyl is imported from Mexico as an actual attack and use it as a pretext for another domestic invocation of the Alien Enemies Act targeting people in America for arbitrary action without due process, after the one using Tren de Agua as the pretext.

This, in turn, is a tool to try to advance Trump’s mass ethnic cleansing policy, without the case-by-case judicial oversight which it would otherwise be subject to.

Ding-ding. I think we have a winner. Venezuela was just a test. Seriously, a US president can order strikes abroad without a judge getting in the way. But for expelling people, then you need at least a pretense.

Hate to say it, but it's a clear TDS...

Do you think Mexican people enjoy living cartel life?

The Iraqi people living under Saddam weren't so happy either but did that justify invasion on the false premise of WMDs and the resulting hundreds of thousands of civilian deaths? I'd be on board with your statement if another Republican hadn't already pulled the same dumb shit within my lifetime before..

What would have been a justifiable premise for invasion then?

Actual WMDs?

Life in Iraq before WMDs wasn't exactly paradise...

"wasn't exactly paradise" places the bar is so low it would justify invading Disneyland.

Iraq gave up its WMD research programs in 1991, so the "before time" is 1962: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iraq_and_weapons_of_mass_destr...

"Doesn't have any WMDs" is also something I can say about Disneyland.

But Disney World did get permission to build their own nuclear reactor: https://www.ans.org/news/article-6500/disney-world-should-ha...

My understanding is that they would like it if US people stopped giving the cartels huge sums of money to feed their drug habits. I'm not sure they want US military incursions.

> Do you think Mexican people enjoy living cartel life?

Whether Mexican people enjoy living “cartel life” is completely irrelevant, one way or the other, to the trends in the linkage between Trump's foreign policy rhetoric and domestic actions that I am talking about.

Any nation that has even a whiff of fentanyl possibly coming across the border.

Yes, I would expect kinetic action (missiles and SOF) before very long. I also anticipate he'll continue to engage in political provocations of Canada in hopes of engineering some kind of diplomatic incident.

That seems less likely than annexing small parcels of land, bit by bit. If there's some Canadian farmland with a meth lab on it, I could see the American coast guard seizing it for 'national security' It would put Canada in an uncomfortable position since Canada hasn't had to worry about defending its border in anyone's lifetime.

Are they gonna sail a cutter into Edmonton then?

It doesn't need to be Coast Guard, specifically, as long as it's a group people don't associate with war (eg: Forest Service, Law Enforcement, etc). A stand off between Canadian Mounties and American Park Rangers would result in fewer heart attacks than soldiers in army jeeps.

It's entertaining that you don't appear to think that any of this is insane.

It's all very stupid and dangerous.

The prospect of the USA invading Canada is so spectacularly insane that people wrongly assume it can't happen.

Are we going to invade China?

https://www.dea.gov/sites/default/files/2020-03/DEA_GOV_DIR-...

Mexican, "snow Mexican" (as us Canadian's are occasionally referred too as...) - who knows at this point...

Not entirely baseless - opioid ODs (a good chunk of them from fentanyl) kill 100K+ Americans every year. About time someone did something with that. Why Biden didn't do anything about it is a mystery - it's a slam dunk issue that'd poll really well.

It simply isn't a weapon of mass destruction. You can bend and twist it any way you like, it simply is not.

Just to ground you a little bit:

> Facts About U.S. Deaths from Excessive Alcohol Use: About 178,000 people die from excessive drinking each year.

https://www.cdc.gov/alcohol/facts-stats/index.html

Come on, this is false equivalence. How many die from a glass of wine that has 1000x more alcohol than lethal dose? How many get intoxicated just by touching a beer bottle itself?

I get where you are going with this tho - decriminalized free access to drugs would be far cheaper and safer for most.

Tobacco kills around 480,000 but you don't see that on the WMD list.

That's because this has nothing to do with mortality; it's all about political expedience.

https://archive.cdc.gov/www_cdc_gov/tobacco/data_statistics/...

You can't OD on tobacco. Your drink can't be spiked-to-death by a cigarette.

The reason I avoid America isn't fucked up border search or lack of freedom of speech for visitors or armed MAGA-heads. It's the disgusting and dangerous streets and crime everywhere.

Technically you can OD on tobacco, too. It's just that it never happens. So stats include all sorts of "tobacco deaths". Got emphysema? Tobacco death. Got lung cancer? Tobacco death. COPD or heart disease? You've guessed it, as long as you smoke, everything is a "tobacco death". And look, I'm not saying that tobacco is not harmful, it is. I'm saying that if we're going to compare the numbers we need to understand what we're comparing.

> It's the disgusting and dangerous streets and crime everywhere.

You should avoid Australia, too - those drop bears are just as likely to get you as “all the crime everywhere” in the US.

FYI, here is an entire page detailing what Biden did about it:

https://bidenwhitehouse.archives.gov/ondcp/the-administratio...

Biden threw $80 billion at the problem, in a mix of harm reduction and interdiction policies, and sought Congressional help on other proposals.

https://bidenwhitehouse.archives.gov/briefing-room/statement...

His problem was that he kept things in perspective, worked through existing institutional infrastructure, and sought legislative authority, as opposed to proclaiming himself to be Zeus and hurling thunderbolts in random directions.

Zeus comparison is oddly apt, not just the hurtling random thunderbolts but also the inability to keep it in his pants..

Trump appears to have put the substantial amount work done by the Biden administration in the toilet.

  In 2021, Mr. Biden issued an executive order imposing sanctions on individuals and companies engaged in the illicit opioid trade. His Treasury Department put sanctions on more than 300 individuals and entities, freezing entire networks of fentanyl suppliers and traffickers out of the international financial system.

  In 2023 and 2024 he identified China as a major illicit drug-producing country for its role in the synthetic opioid trade — a blow to the reputation of China’s chemical industry.

  Simultaneously, the Biden administration pushed U.S. law enforcement agencies to conduct aggressive investigations and build indictments against dozens of Chinese citizens and companies that were trafficking fentanyl precursor chemicals into the United States. 

  [..] Biden secured a personal commitment from President Xi Jinping to restart counternarcotics cooperation in November 2023 

  [..] And we made progress. International fentanyl supply chains showed signs of disruption, forcing traffickers to change sources and tactics.

  Together with other diplomatic initiatives and an expansive public health campaign, the number of lethal fentanyl overdoses in the United States has dropped.

  In the 12 months ending September 2024, overdose deaths were down an estimated 24 percent from the year prior.

  Thousands of American lives have been saved.

Now, of course, China no longer wants to play ball with the US chasing down the traffickers thanks to Trump and his tariffs.

~ https://www.nytimes.com/2025/03/18/opinion/trump-china-trade...

That's all wonderful, but we still had 107K people die of OD last year. In part because Biden let everyone in from Mexico.

In reality Biden did more about overdoses than Trump did - the rapid increase in overdoses occurred firmly within the first Trump term, and only slowed and levelled out in response to Biden policy changes.

The raw CDC stats tell the story.

  The age-adjusted rate of drug overdose deaths did not significantly increase from 2021 (32.4) to

2022 (32.6).

  In contrast, rates have significantly increased in most previous years.

  From 2019 to 2020, the drug overdose death rate increased 31.0% from 21.6 to 28.3, which was the largest annual increase over the period 2002–2022.

~ https://stacks.cdc.gov/view/cdc/135849

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