Despite his claims of sobriety, Donald Trump loves drugs. Without them, he wouldn’t have the bogeyman he requires to push forward the most authoritarian aspects of his agenda: mass surveillance, squads of secret police and wars of imperialism. Like every U.S. president since Richard Nixon, the architect of the militarized approach to drug policy, Trump has enjoyed the excess powers afforded by the drug war. But that doesn’t mean the current president truly understands the battle he’s fighting.
Trump on his most recent jaunt through Asia met with Chinese President Xi Jinping to discuss the trade war he started. One of his negotiations was to lower tariffs by 10% in return for China cracking down on fentanyl precursors — the chemicals used to make some synthetic opioids.
“I put a 20% tariff on China because of the fentanyl coming in, which is [a] big tariff,” Trump said on Oct. 30. “And based on his statements today, I reduced it by 10%. So, it’s 10% instead of 20%, effective immediately. I believe he’s going to work very hard to stop the death that’s coming in.”
That would be lovely if it were true — and that should be the metric we’re going for, reducing deaths, instead of the disproportionate focus on border seizures and arrests, which can be counterproductive. But there’s not really much evidence that Trump’s new deal will actually help reduce overdose deaths. While China has agreed to reduce fentanyl precursor exports, in part through a working group, it’s a strategy that’s been tried at least three times in the last decade with little success.
“The administration has made significant compromises in its own position on China and counternarcotics by now accepting a commitment to launch a working group,” Henrietta Levin, a former director for China on President Joe Biden’s National Security Council, told Reuters. “You start to wonder how many times they can sell us exactly the same half-hearted commitment,” added Levin, who is now a senior fellow at the Center for Strategic and International Studies.
Even if you were somehow to control every aspect of fentanyl production, that doesn’t really reflect what the current drug market in the U.S. looks like.
Even if this strategy worked, fentanyl precursors would likely just shift to another country, such as India, which is already happening. Clandestine drug chemists will also shift away from using banned precursors, which is happening as well. These are often very basic chemicals used in many legitimate medications, which makes it difficult to stop them from slipping into the illicit market. For example, 4-piperidone is a fentanyl precursor that has been internationally and domestically banned for years — but it’s related to piperidine, one of the most important and widely used building blocks of drug synthesis, used in more than 20 different classes of pharmaceuticals, including cancer drugs, antibiotics and more. Fentanyl’s core structure is also piperidine. If you can’t get there from 4-piperidone, it can be derived from plenty of other chemicals.
“The core structure of fentanyl is readily modified; therefore, structural modifications of the base structure of fentanyl are quite unchallenging,” a paper in the Journal of the American Society for Mass Spectrometry reports.
But even if you were somehow to control every aspect of fentanyl production, that doesn’t really reflect what the current drug market in the U.S. looks like. Some of the most common street drugs these days are mixtures of xylazine, medetomidine and nitazenes. If you’ve never heard of these substances, that’s OK. Trump, who apparently can’t even pronounce acetaminophen, probably hasn’t either.
Nitazenes are an emerging class of synthetic opioids responsible for an increasing number of overdose deaths globally, with at least 13 different types identified. But they are manufactured in a completely different way from fentanyl. Its precursor is not piperidine but benzimidazole, another extremely common chemical used to make legal drugs.
As for xylazine and medetomidine, which are increasingly found in “tranq dope” or “dex,” they are not even opioids — they’re sedatives used by veterinarians that can either be sourced from China, but also just as easily from legitimate veterinary supply chains.
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All of this is to say, it seems difficult to stop the “death that’s coming in” if drug labs can just cook up something else. It raises the question: what is even the goal of slapping tariffs on China if it won’t stop the flow of drugs even a little bit?
Trump’s other strategy to curb drug trafficking is to bring in the military, ordering airstrikes against alleged drug traffickers, with threats to expand operations into Venezuela and Mexico. So far, there have been at least 13 strikes on boats in the Caribbean and Eastern Pacific, killing at least 64 people. All of this is blatantly illegal in the eyes of many experts, with the U.N.’s human rights chief Volker Türk saying, “These attacks – and their mounting human cost – are unacceptable.”
The Trump administration has defended these attacks and their legality, but it’s not even clear if their stated goal — to stop the flow of drugs — will actually work. The biggest issue is that fentanyl isn’t coming from that direction at all. Instead, precursors flow from Asia to Mexico — sometimes into the U.S. first — where it is then synthesized into a narcotic and smuggled across the U.S.-Mexico border.
Not even much cocaine, which is not responsible for overdose deaths at the same scale as opioids, comes from Venezuela. As the New York Times reported in October, “In the 1980s and ’90s, the Caribbean was the main route for smugglers taking cocaine to the United States. Now, most of that traffic moves through the Pacific.”
The drugs likely aren’t the target of these military attacks. As Sebastian Gorka, a deputy assistant to the president, explained on Newsmax recently, “It’s not just about the drugs.” Gorka defended blowing up boats because of Venezuela’s links to “other bad actors, other states, other nations who, for example, have been plotting to target members of this administration, including the president. Iran’s tentacles into this hemisphere go straight through Caracas and Venezuela.”
So attacking boats isn’t likely to stop the drugs or overdose deaths. But it doesn’t matter to the Trump administration because Nicolás Maduro, the president of Venezuela, is viewed as a terrorist. This shifting argument is reminiscent of the evolving excuses to invade Iraq: first, it was to stop Saddam Hussein from having weapons of mass destruction. When those weren’t found, it became about “promoting democracy.”
It seems, like most aspects of the drug war, the military attacks have little to do with drugs and likely a lot more to do with overthrowing Maduro and seizing the country’s oil reserves, as Trump has bragged about doing.
“When I left, Venezuela was ready to collapse. We would have taken it over; we would have gotten to all that oil; it would have been right next door,” Trump said at a North Carolina rally in 2023.
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In spite of all this, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention have reported massive drops in overdose deaths — though as Salon has reported, these declines are complex and don’t impact everyone equally. In May, the CDC reported a 27% drop in predicted drug overdose deaths in 2024 compared to 2023. Far too many people are still dying from drugs, but addiction remains a public health crisis, not a terrorist threat.
In the overwhelming focus on drug supply, what is left out of the conversation is why people turn to drugs in the first place. Trauma, especially child sexual abuse, is often the root of substance use disorders. Economic inequality — like the kind driven by unnecessary trade wars — is also a major factor in addiction. Reducing demand is a key strategy left out of Trump’s drug war. Neither mental health nor poverty is addressed by bombing boats or tariffs.
Furthermore, access to medications like methadone and buprenorphine is critical for reducing overdose deaths, a consideration that seems to have eluded the Trump administration. According to the National Institute on Drug Abuse, “opioid overdose deaths decreased by 59 percent for those receiving methadone and 38 percent for those receiving buprenorphine.” Other research has found even higher rates of success, with one study finding patients “had an 80 percent lower risk of dying from an opioid overdose compared with people in treatment without the use of medications.”
Instead of expanding access to these medications, the Trump administration has attacked the agencies responsible for mental health and addiction treatment. As Stat recently reported, “Since January, layoffs and funding cuts at the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration have ground much of the agency’s work to a halt. The agency has terminated $1.7 billion in block grants for state health departments and cut roughly $350 million in addiction and overdose prevention funding.”
Meanwhile, Medicaid — which plays a central role in addressing the overdose crisis as the country’s largest source of addiction treatment funding — has been gutted by nearly $1 trillion. If this administration really wants to stop overdose deaths, why are they adopting strategies that will likely cause them to increase?
Trump doesn’t seem to understand what specific drugs are killing Americans or where they come from. Trump doesn’t seem to understand why people use drugs or what they really need to address. And he doesn’t seem to care, because the drugs are merely an excuse for a broader effort to invade South America and Mexico, while bullying China into negotiations that accomplish next to nothing. Trump’s era of the drug war is unlikely to accomplish anything related to public health — but it will help him consolidate power.
