President Donald Trump signed an executive order marking fentanyl a weapon of mass destruction on Monday, escalating his war against drug trafficking during his second administration.
The order directs Attorney General Pam Bondi to pursue criminal charges, sentencing enhancements, and sentencing variances in fentanyl trafficking cases, according to a White House fact sheet. It also directs Secretary of State Marco Rubio and the Secretary of the Treasury Scott Bessent to take actions against financial institutions involved in manufacturing or distributing the illegal sale of fentanyl.
Secretary of War Pete Hegseth will work with Bondi and Secretary of Homeland Security Kristi Noem to provide enhanced national security resources and update their chemical incident response to include the fentanyl threat.
“There’s no doubt that America’s adversaries are trafficking fentanyl into the United States in part because they want to kill Americans. If this were a war, that would be one of the worst wars,” Trump said while speaking in the Oval Office.
Trump claimed that drug traffickers have been killing anywhere between 200,000 and 300,000 Americans per year over the past five or six years, before awarding a newly formed Mexican Border Defense Medal to 13 military members for their efforts to secure the U.S. southern 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,” Trump said. “We’re formally classified as a weapon of mass destruction, which is what it is.”
The president touted his efforts to slash the amount of fentanyl pouring into the U.S., including browbeating China, Mexico, and Canada into decreasing the amount of fentanyl being smuggled across the border.
“We’ve also achieved a 50% drop in the amount of fentanyl coming across the border, and China is working with us very closely, bringing down the number and the amount of fentanyl that’s being shipped,” said Trump.
“You know, fentanyl is very bad when you mix it with certain ingredients, but it also is very important for medicine, for anesthesia, various other things,” Trump continued. “I want people to understand that it’s not made necessarily for bad. When it’s mixed with certain things, it becomes bad, and that’s what’s taking place in Mexico.”
The president also claimed that his administration completed the largest fentanyl bust in the nation’s history, “seizing 3 million fentanyl pills all at one time.”
NATIONAL GUARD SEIZES OVER A MILLION FENTANYL PILLS IN CALIFORNIA
“And last month, we seized another 1.7 million fentanyl pills in the state of Colorado, the poorly run state of Colorado, with a governor who’s incompetent,” Trump said, criticizing Gov. Jared Polis (D-CO).
Trump also hinted that marijuana could be reclassified under his administration: “A lot of people want to see it, the reclassification, because it leads to tremendous amounts of research that can’t be done unless you reclassify, so we are looking at that very strongly.”
