Another day, another executive order where President Donald Trump just dashes off an unhinged note, and everyone has to treat it like a law. And since Congress and the Supreme Court seem to have tacitly agreed that this is how government works now, what’s to stop him, really?
So, sure, yeah, whatever. Illicit fentanyl and its core precursor chemicals are now weapons of mass destruction. Got it, Donny.
This is bog-stupid, even for Trump. The United Nations defines what WMDs are, and fentanyl just … isn’t. A WMD is something that has “characteristics comparable in destructive effect to those of the atomic bomb” or “produce in a single moment an enormous destructive effect capable to kill millions of civilians, jeopardize the natural environment, and fundamentally alter the lives of future generations through their catastrophic effects.”
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This is also stupid from a practical standpoint. Since fentanyl is an entirely synthetic opioid, traffickers just change the precursor chemicals when existing ones are targeted. It’s an ever-shifting target. Next, some of those chemicals have legitimate uses that aren’t at all related to drugs. Sodium borohydride, for example, is on the Drug Enforcement Administration’s Special Surveillance List because it is a fentanyl precursor, but it’s also what paper manufacturers use to bleach their paper and packaging.
Under existing law, if you sell a chemical on the SSL with reckless disregard as to whether it will be used for illegal drug manufacturing, your company faces a $250,000 fine. But if that sodium borohydride is now a WMD akin to uranium, there’s no world where somehow the chemical company-to-paper mill part of things chugs along just fine while elsewhere having a couple grains of sodium borohydride on you is punishable by death or whatever.
But this isn’t really about fentanyl at all, which is why the order can be all loosey-goosey about how things work. This order is about vastly expanding the use of the United States military and casting about for a way to say that we are at war with Venezuelan drug traffickers and can therefore bomb boats in the Caribbean with impunity
Trump’s latest unhinged executive order first directs Attorney General Pam Bondi to “immediately pursue investigations and prosecutions into fentanyl trafficking, including through criminal charges as appropriate, sentencing enhancements, and sentencing variances.”
Okay, let’s stop you right there. Isn’t that already what the Department of Justice does when it comes to drug trafficking? Investigating, charging, and prosecuting federal crimes is kinda the whole deal for the DOJ, and U.S. attorneys issue press releases about their successful fentanyl prosecutions all the time.
It also directs the secretaries of state and the treasury to go after assets and bank accounts, which is also a thing that already happens routinely.
But here’s the part that really matters:
The Secretary of War and the Attorney General shall determine whether the threats posed by illicit fentanyl and its impact on the United States warrant the provision of resources from the Department of War to the Department of Justice to aid in the enforcement of title 18 of the United States Code, as consistent with 10 U.S.C. 282.
That statute allows the attorney general to ask the defense secretary to assist with DOJ activities if there is an emergency involving a WMD, defined as when “civilian expertise and capabilities are not readily available to provide the required assistance to counter the threat immediately posed by the weapon involved” and “special capabilities and expertise of the Department of Defense are necessary and critical to counter the threat posed by the weapon involved.”
The situation being described here is pretty clearly “the FBI has learned there is a dirty bomb on a passenger train in Newark and needs immediate assistance and expertise from the military to stop a tragedy,” not “We want to catch more drug traffickers.”
This looks like a pretty blatant attempt at getting a widespread permission slip for military personnel to be used in domestic criminal investigations, which is not great!
Here’s the other part that sucks:
[T]o ensure the United States uses the full array of appropriate counter-fentanyl tools, the Secretary of Homeland Security, as consistent with applicable law and in coordination with the heads of relevant agencies, as appropriate, shall identify threat networks related to fentanyl smuggling using WMD- and nonproliferation-related threat intelligence to support the full spectrum of counter-fentanyl operations.
This one is another desperate attempt to make the boat bombings lawful. And just in time, too, as the administration is gearing up to do land strikes in Venezuela.
One little problem that the administration can’t get around by waving a magic WMD wand is that Venezuela doesn’t produce fentanyl.
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There’s also the problem that the administration has reassigned everyone to the “brutally torturing immigrants” project, which means drug arrests have already dropped, and fewer new investigations are being opened.
But rather than do those actual investigations and prosecutions, which is what should be happening if we face such a deadly scourge, this instead is an attempt to get full war on terror authority, a blank check for Trump and Pete Hegseth and Pam Bondi and Stephen Miller and Kristi Noem to do anything they want, any time, anywhere.
The worst people in the world should never get that power—especially not in this transparently stupid way.
