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Over the past decade, the synthetic drug fentanyl has devastated the United States, killing more than a quarter of a million Americans, making it, according to some officials, the deadliest drug in US history. And over the past two months, even amid signs that the fentanyl crisis is starting to wane, the drug has also taken on an unexpectedly prominent role in American national security and economic policy. The initial justification for the off-again, on-again tariffs on Canada and Mexico as well as tariffs on China, which are in effect cited what the White House said was these countries failure at stopping poisonous fentanyl and other drugs from flowing into our country. President Donald Trump agreed to delay the tariffs on Mexico and Canada after they promised steps to address the crisis, but they are once again scheduled to take effect this week. The administration is also reportedly preparing an executive order that would designate fentanyl as a weapon of mass destruction, potentially paving the way for military action against drug cartels in Mexico. Trump talked repeatedly about the possibility of using military force on Mexican soil during his campaign and has already designated several cartels as foreign terrorist organizations. In recent congressional testimony, Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard cited fentanyl as a top threat to US national security. Whether or not threatening tariffs and military action will actually stop fentanyl from entering the United States, Trump is correct about one thing: fentanyl is a global issue, and it takes a complex global shadow economy involving labs in China and cartels in Mexico to get these deadly chemicals onto US streets. He made the fentanyl epidemic a major issue during his campaign, and anecdotally at least, his tough message seems to have resonated with families and communities affected by the drug. But now that hes in office, critics say his policies are unlikely to keep Americans from dying from fentanyl use, and in some cases, may be counterproductive and that fentanyl is being used as a cover to provide a security rationale for Trumps trade and immigration policies. The fentanyl crisis, briefly explainedFentanyl is a powerful synthetic opioid, meaning it is created in a lab from precursor chemicals, rather than being derived from a plant like traditional opium. It comes in a wide number of chemical variants. It was originally created by Belgian chemists in 1959 as an alternative to morphine, the dominant painkiller at the time. Fentanyl works faster, is more powerful, and less likely to cause nausea. It quickly caught on as an operating room anesthetic for surgery, and is still widely used for legitimate medical purposes today. It is also extremely addictive, and its recreational use was placed under international control in the mid-1960s. Fentanyl first turned up as a street drug in California in the late 1970s, where it was misleadingly marketed by dealers as a purer form of heroin called China white.But illegal fentanyl use in the United States didnt really take off until decades later, on the heels of the larger American opioid crisis in the 1990s, when doctors began prescribing larger and larger quantities of newly available opioids like oxycontin for pain management. Many people who first became addicted to prescription painkillers later turned to illegal drugs like heroin, which Mexican cartels began bringing into the US in vastly larger quantities in the late 2000s. Then, around 2012, fentanyl, far more powerful than heroin, began arriving in the United States. At first, it was shipped to dealers through the mail from chemical factories in China. Mexican cartels, sensing a business opportunity, quickly got into the fentanyl trade themselves. Overdose deaths quickly skyrocketed. By 2016, it was the deadliest drug in the United States. Only a few milligrams of fentanyl can be lethal, and the fact that dealers often mix it with other drugs, like heroin, is part of what makes it so deadly: Users often dont know how much fentanyl theyre taking, or that theyre taking it at all. The opioid epidemic, exacerbated by the Covid pandemic and fentanyl overdose deaths, reached a peak of more than 73,000 deaths in 2022. Overdose deaths have declined since then, which experts attribute to a number of factors: the waning impact of the pandemic, more awareness of fentanyls dangers, and the increasing availability of test strips that can detect the presence of fentanyl in a dose of another drug, and naloxone, a medication used to treat overdoses which is now carried routinely by first responders and available over the counter. The decline is relative, however. Overdoses involving synthetic opioids mainly fentanyl are the leading cause of death for Americans between 18 and 45.Stop 1: China China has the worlds largest chemical industry, accounting for nearly half of global production, the vast majority of it entirely legal. In the shadows of this industry are the facilities creating the ingredients for most of Americas fentanyl. Fentanyl comes in a vast number of varieties, and while many of these were tightly controlled in China, chemists could easily make their product technically legal with just a minor molecular variation, staying one step ahead of regulators. In the early days of the fentanyl crisis, Chinese manufacturers would then ship finished fentanyl by mail, either directly to the United States or to Mexican cartels who would facilitate its distribution. In 2019, after years of diplomatic pressure from both the Obama and Trump administrations, the Chinese government agreed to declare all varieties of fentanyl a controlled substance. After that, Chinese manufacturers and trafficking networks simply shifted to the production and sale of the precursor chemicals used to make fentanyl. With these chemicals, the final drug is relatively easy for an amateur chemist to produce. The problem from a law enforcement perspective is that many of these chemicals are dual use; they have legitimate industrial or medical uses, making them harder to control. China is not known for a lax approach to drugs. Its one of the few countries in the world that executes drug traffickers and dealers including four Canadian citizens just last month and has opposed measures at the United Nations calling for a shift toward less punitive drug policies.US officials, noting the discrepancy between these hardline policies and Beijings relatively hands-off approach to fentanyl production, have accused China of deliberately turning a blind eye to these exports, or even deliberately encouraging them. During his first term, Trump accused China of sending their garbage and killing our people, calling it almost a form of warfare. A House of Representatives subcommittee report last year accused the Chinese government of directly subsidizing the production of fentanyl through various tax incentives. Theres some historical irony to the charge, which the Chinese government strongly denies, that it is deliberately flooding the West with opiates. In the 19th century, Britain fought a war against China to open the countrys markets after the Qing dynasty sought to combat a growing addiction problem by banning imports of opium from British India. The opium wars began what is often called the century of humiliation that, according to the official narrative, ended with the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) coming to power. A number of US commentators have accused the CCP of waging a reverse opium war today.Most experts say its impossible to prove that China is deliberately exporting fentanyl to the US as a matter of government policy. Are China and the Communist Party doing all that they can to stop the production and shipping of fentanyl precursor material for illegal use? Theyre probably not, said David Luckey, a senior international and defense researcher at the RAND Corporation. I will also say that China is a large nation. They have the largest chemical production in the world. So regulating something as large as Chinese chemical production is a very difficult thing.Theres more evidence to show that China cooperates with the US when it feels its in its interest to do so and is willing to use that cooperation to gain leverage on other issues, said Vanda Felbab-Brown, a senior fellow and expert on transnational crime at the Brookings Institution. For instance, anti-drug cooperation was suspended after former House Speaker Nancy Pelosis controversial visit to Taiwan in 2022, then resumed following a high-level summit between Presidents Joe Biden and Xi Jinping the following year. (In return, the US lifted sanctions on a controversial Chinese lab.)This transactional approach is a very different proposition than to allege that China is purposely trying to kill US people, said Felbab-Brown though as long as Chinese companies continue producing these chemicals and shipping them across the Pacific, the end result may be largely the same. Stop 2: Mexico Next, the precursor chemicals, often misleadingly labeled, often arrive by ship at Mexicos Pacific ports of Manzanillo and Lzaro Crdenas. (While some fentanyl consumed in the US is produced domestically from precursor chemicals, far more is produced in Mexico.) Fentanyl distribution is primarily controlled by two cartels, the Sinaloa cartel, formerly led by the notorious drug lord Joaquin El Chapo Guzman, and the more recently founded Jalisco New Generation Cartel. These organizations dominated the supply of heroin and other drugs into the US, but the appeal of synthetic compounds like fentanyl was obvious to them from the start. Their business is not any one drug. Their business is money, said Cecilia Farfan-Mendez, a professor and expert on organized crime in Mexico at UC San Diego. Unlike heroin, cocaine, or marijuana, fentanyl doesnt require crop fields that are vulnerable to the weather or being spotted by authorities. It can be produced in rudimentary facilities in the center of towns. Theyre very rustic labs, said Mike Vigil, former director of the US Drug Enforcement Administrations international operations. They consist of utensils that you would find in a normal kitchen, and they use metal tubs to mix the chemicals. They dont care about quality control.Compared with other drugs, fentanyls potency means smugglers can make huge profits from much smaller and much harder to detect quantities. Luckey estimated that around three pickup truckloads of pure fentanyl could supply the US market for about a year. Eventually I think theyre going to phase out plant-based drugs and going to nothing but synthetic drugs, said Vigil. It costs them pennies to manufacture a dosage unit of fentanyl, which can then be sold here in the United States, depending on the area, from anywhere from $5 to $20 or $30 a tablet.Cooperation on fentanyl between the US and Mexican governments has been rocky in recent years. Some US officials have blamed this on corruption in Mexico. Like China, the Mexican government can also, at times, leverage anti-drug cooperation to influence the US on other issues. For instance, US-Mexico drug policy cooperation reached a nadir after the US arrest of a former Mexican defense minister accused of drug trafficking in 2020. Mexicos previous president, Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador, who came into office promising a controversial hugs not bullets approach to the cartels, claimed inaccurately that no fentanyl was produced in Mexico and said Americas drug crisis was the result of social decay. Felbab-Brown says Lopez Obrador was able to leverage cooperation on stopping migration across the Mexico-US border to avoid pressure from the US on other issues, including fentanyl. Mexican President Claudia Sheinbaum took office in October, and even before Trumps tariff threats, there were indications she was taking a harder line against the cartels than her predecessor. Fentanyl has been a source of friction between the US, Mexico, and China since the drug emerged as a major threat during the Obama administration. Canada, the other target of Trumps tariff threats, is another story. Canada is dealing with an opioid crisis of its own the second worst in the world after the United States with more than 49,000 overdose deaths between 2016 and 2024. It has also seen a recent expansion of organized crime and money laundering groups linked to the drug trade. Canadian authorities have taken down a number of massive fentanyl labs in rural areas in recent years, including one in British Columbia last year that contained enough fentanyl and precursor chemicals to produce more than 95.5 million potentially lethal doses enough to kill every Canadian twice over.But theres little evidence that Canada is a significant source of the fentanyl entering the US: In 2024, it was estimated at less than 0.2 percent of the total. In fact, authorities have seized more fentanyl crossing from the US into Canada than vice versa. Some officials and cartel sources say the real amount of fentanyl slipping south over the border is probably a lot higher. The US-Canada border is longer and less defended than the US-Mexico border, so more drugs may be crossing undetected. But for the moment, theres little material evidence that Canada is a major source of American fentanyl even though the Trump administration has used this supposed threat to justify aggressive economic policy.How Trump wants to address the crisis Experts who spoke with Vox said that putting an end to the fentanyl crisis will require a three-pronged approach aimed at supply, demand, and harm reduction. Trumps approach favors one of the prongs over the other two.The administration is putting almost all its focus on the supply side, said Felbab-Brown. She added that while historically, the US has put a huge amount of pressure on countries like Bolivia and Colombia to eradicate drugs, the level of punitiveness were seeing now with China, Mexico, and Canada is unprecedented.Vigil, the former DEA agent, is skeptical that the aggressive approach to foreign governments will have the desired impact, and said it could even make collaboration more difficult. Starting a trade war and bashing the heads of China, Canada, and Mexico over the head instead of using diplomacy is not going to work. Its going to have a deleterious effect, he said. Trump has also blamed undocumented immigrants and migrants for bringing drugs, misery, and death across the border UC San Diegos Mendez says the link the administration has drawn between undocumented migration and drug smuggling is also misleading. The people who actually bring [fentanyl] in are US citizens, she said. It makes sense from a business perspective. You want people who have a legal way of entry into the US. Youre not going to put it in the hands of migrants or asylum seekers. Given the tiny amounts of fentanyl needed to supply the nations drug markets, stopping all the fentanyl from entering the US is a daunting prospect. Even if the Chinese government were perfectly cooperative and were somehow able to shut down all the chemical supplies, its likely another source could emerge to replace it. India, which also has a large chemical industry and similar regulatory issues, has already emerged as a potential alternative. In any case, Vigil added, youre not going to stop the supply unless you stop the demand. On that front, some of the Trump administrations early moves have not been encouraging. Transactions between chemical producers and fentanyl traffickers are often conducted on the dark web, and law enforcement and media reports have highlighted the increasing role cryptocurrencies have played in these transactions. Rather than crack down, Trump has moved to aggressively deregulate cryptocurrencies. As one of his first executive actions, he pardoned Ross Ulbricht, creator of the infamous dark web drug marketplace Silk Road. Felbab-Brown, of Brookings, raised concerns that cuts to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention data collection operations could make it harder to get accurate information about overdoses and fatalities, and that cuts to Medicaid could make it harder for opioid users to seek treatment. Trumps secretary of Health and Human Services, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., is a well-known skeptic of using medication to treat addiction and has proposed building a network of farms or camps where people experiencing addiction can be sent to recover methods many experts are skeptical will work for a drug as powerfully addictive as fentanyl. The good news is that the years-long wave of deaths from fentanyl appears now to be receding. But theres no guarantee this trend is permanent, no matter who occupies the White House.The landscape of synthetic drugs is changing so quickly that its difficult for nations and their law enforcement efforts to keep up, and so we need to take some sort of revolutionary approach, because if we only continue in attempts at evolving our response, were never going to get there, said Luckey.If Americas experience of opioids in the 21st century has taught us anything, its that the crisis can always mutate into a new and deadlier form. See More:
