I missed this yesterday. Whoops!
President Donald Trump declared fentanyl a weapon of mass destruction during a press conference to award military men and women who played a prominent role in defending our border.
That’s why today I’m taking one more step to protect Americans from the scourge of deadly fentanyl flooding into our country 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.No bomb does what this is doing. 200 to 300,000 people die every year that we know of.So we’re formally classifying fentanyl as a weapon of mass destruction.
A tiny amount of fentanyl can kill numerous people.
“The manufacture and distribution of fentanyl, primarily performed by organized criminal networks, threatens our national security and fuels lawlessness in our hemisphere and at our borders,” according to the executive order. “The production and sale of fentanyl by Foreign Terrorist Organizations and cartels fund these entities’ operations — which include assassinations, terrorist acts, and insurgencies around the world — and allow these entities to erode our domestic security and the well-being of our Nation.”
The EO pointed out that two cartels bear the most responsibility for pushing fentanyl into America. Their competing against each other leads to “large-scale violence and death that go beyond the immediate threat of fentanyl itself.”
The possibility of weaponizing fentanyl “for concentrated, large-scale terror attacks by organized adversaries is a serious threat to the United States.”
A DEA 2024 National Drug Threat Assessment found that the Sinaloa and Jalisco cartels are at the center of the fentanyl crisis.
“They rely on chemical companies and pill press companies in China to supply the precursor chemicals and pill presses needed to manufacture the drugs,” the DEA wrote in the report. “They operate clandestine labs in Mexico where they manufacture these drugs, and then utilize their vast distribution networks to transport the drugs into the United States.”
The cartels use Chinese Money Laundering Organizations to move the money from America back to Mexico.
I wrote about that process in June 2024.
At that time, the DOJ indicted the Los Angeles-based members of Mexico’s Sinaloa drug cartel in connection with a massive drug money laundering scheme totaling over $50 million linked to Chinese organized crime.
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