President Donald Trump said Monday he was classifying fentanyl as a weapon of mass destruction, ramping up his administration's campaign against drug cartels in Latin America.
"No bomb does what this is doing — 200-300,000 people die every year, that we know of," Trump said at the signing of an executive order that placed fentanyl in the same category as nuclear and chemical weapons.
In 2024, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reported an estimated total of about 80,000 overdose deaths in the country, with some 48,000 of those due to synthetic opioids.
The executive order said "illicit fentanyl is closer to a chemical weapon than a narcotic" and that it "threatens our national security and fuels lawlessness in our hemisphere and at our borders."
The fentanyl classification ties in with the Trump administration's war against alleged "narco-terrorists," which has included a military campaign targeting alleged drug-smuggling boats with strikes that have left nearly 90 people dead since early September.
While Trump argues that destroying each of the more than 20 intercepted vessels saves 25,000 American lives, critics note that the boats were likely carrying cocaine rather than fentanyl — the synthetic opioid driving the overdose crisis — which is overwhelmingly smuggled across the southern border from Mexico, not by sea from Colombia or Venezuela.
Trump has accompanied the strikes with a massive military buildup in the Caribbean that includes the world's largest aircraft carrier and a slew of other warships, while a string of U.S. military aircraft have flown along Venezuela's coast in recent weeks.
While Trump and his administration say the target of the military buildup is drug trafficking, Venezuela's leftist leader Nicolas Maduro accuses Washington of using narcotics smuggling as a pretext for regime change in Caracas.
The United States has sought to link the two issues, accusing Maduro of leading the alleged "Cartel of the Suns," which it declared a "narco-terrorist" organization last month, and offering a $50 million reward for information leading to his capture.