President Donald Trump signed an executive order on Tuesday designating the opioid fentanyl a “weapon of mass destruction” and describing drug flows into the country as “a direct military threat to the United States of America.” The preposterous order seems intended to expand the grounds on which the U.S. can wage war in the Western hemisphere and beyond.
Trump’s executive order mischaracterizes illicit fentanyl as something “closer to a chemical weapon than a narcotic” that “threatens our national security and fuels lawlessness in our hemisphere and at our borders.” It calls on the Department of Defense, the Department of Homeland Security and the Department of Justice to collectively guard against “the potential for fentanyl to be weaponized for concentrated, large-scale terror attacks by organized adversaries.”
Trump has attempted to appropriate the ideas and language of former President George W. Bush’s “war on terror” toward new ends.
Trump’s description of fentanyl as a chemical weapon is untenable. Fentanyl is a synthetic opioid (which is a lot more potent than heroin and morphine). Though it is abused illicitly as a street drug, classifying it as a weapon — to say nothing of a “weapon of mass destruction” — makes no sense if only because it also is used in the U.S. for legitimate medical reasons. Nobody disputes that fentanyl’s tremendous potency makes it extremely dangerous outside of a supervised medical context, but a drug that can be deadly isn’t necessarily a weapon.
Trump’s executive order rests on the assumption that drug cartels are terrorist organizations that see the U.S. as their adversary. But terrorist organizations have political and ideological goals. By contrast, cartels are profit-seeking entities, and they view selling fentanyl and other drugs as a way to make money. They certainly exhibit a callous disregard for life in their distribution of fentanyl, but given that their business model requires responding to demand in the marketplace for illicit drugs, they’re obviously not actively seeking to kill off their consumers. And while cartels employ violence and sometimes seek political influence in the countries they’re based in, they do this toward the end of achieving their monopolistic business goals, not creating or ruling over a new kind of society.
Furthermore, none of the lethal effects of fentanyl approach the threshold for how we understand weapons of mass destruction, which the United Nations General Assembly defined in the 1970s as “atomic explosive weapons, radioactive material weapons, lethal chemical and biological weapons, and any weapons developed in the future which might have characteristics comparable in destructive effect to those of the atomic bomb or other weapons mentioned above.”
Trump’s “weapon of mass destruction” language defies common sense — but it symbolizes how much he has attempted to appropriate the ideas and language of former President George W. Bush’s “war on terror” toward new ends in the Western hemisphere. Trump’s talk of “narco-terrorists” and weapons of mass destruction is clearly meant to conjure up fear and paranoia and help establish a rationale for ongoing U.S. military action in the Caribbean, and potentially serve as a pretext for military actions against countries with drug cartels, including Venezuela, Mexico and Colombia. In particular, Trump’s threats to use force to pursue regime change in Venezuela has reached disturbing levels in the past month, and it’s worrying to see Trump unveil new language that he could try to use to escalate things further. But just as Bush’s weapons of mass destruction rhetoric justifying a brutal war in Iraq was based on lies, so is Trump’s attempt to paint the U.S. as under siege. Venezuela, Trump’s primary target for saber-rattling in the Americas, has virtually no role in the fentanyl trade. But even if it did, military action against Venezuela would not be a solution to it — as the drug trade is famously immune to militarized solutions. Trump’s invocation of war-on-terror concepts is ironic given how he has condemned and campaigned against forever wars in the past. He may not realize that his borrowing from Bush’s lexicon could backfire. America has a short memory, but it’s hard to imagine most of the country — including his base — has entirely forgotten the last time the specter of weapons of mass destruction were used to justify a catastrophic policy decision. The use of this notorious term could potentially end up drawing more scrutiny toward Trump than the cartels.
Zeeshan Aleem is a writer and editor for MS NOW. 
The opioid overdose epidemic in America is a serious problem and requires serious solutions. Summarily declaring the drug in question a weapon of mass destruction isn’t one of them.
