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A few weeks after the election, President-elect Trump announced that he would impose a 25% tariff on all Mexican products and an additional 10% tariff on all Chinese products until the flow of illegal drugs from those countries was stopped. These measures will do more to stop the growing scourge of illegal drugs than all the steps taken to date in the “war on drugs”.
Over the past few years, the flow of illegal drugs into our country has acquired the character of a tsunami, with bouts of taking fentanyl pills has grown dramatically from 4 million in 2020 to 115 million last year. The destruction wrought on American society by this traffic is catastrophic.
The opioid crisis alone costs us more than 100,000 overdose deaths and $1.5 trillion annually, while the flow of high-potency methamphetamine from Mexico is fueling a new wave of methamphetamine, destroying lives, families and neighborhoods.
President Trump’s actions will do more to stifle the growing respect for illegal drugs than any steps taken to date in the “war on drugs.” (Saul Loeb/AFP via Getty Images)
The The Biden administration facilitated this deadly traffic by weakening our border protections and ignoring opportunities to stop the illicit drug supply chain now centered in China and Mexico.
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Instead, he focused on “harm reduction” in the U.S. — rolling out overdose drugs like naxalone and funding more addiction treatment. While these steps are not objectionable in themselves, they are an inadequate response to the flood of poison we are facing. It’s like fighting violent crime by offering more bandages.
Real progress requires eliminating the supply of drugs at their source. There is a great opportunity here in the US because the supply chain for the drugs that are poisoning America has become very concentrated and vulnerable. It depends entirely on the illegal activity in the two countries – the production of illegal drugs Communist Chinaand drug processing and distribution operations in cartel safe harbors in Mexico.
All of this illegal activity is carried out with – and indeed requires – the connivance or willful blindness of host governments. As Trump’s announced tariffs show, the US has the tools and leverage to force China and Mexico to end these operations. This would deal a decisive blow: once these operations were dismantled, it would be impossible to replicate them anywhere else on the current scale.
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China has become a center for illegal drug production because illegal drugs are increasingly synthesized chemically rather than produced from cultivated plants. China offers the two prerequisites needed to supply the US market: a large chemical industrial base and a government willing to allow its factories to produce illegal drugs and their precursors on a large scale.
Chinese factories produce the necessary ingredients for almost everyone fentanyl and other synthetic opioidsas well as 80% of the meth coming into the US and producing a new wave of drugs worse than fentanyl, such as nitazene and xylazine (“trank”). Simply put, without Chinese manufacturing, America’s drug problem would be only a fraction of what it is.
Communist China could easily stop this activity if it wanted to. But a recent report by a bipartisan special committee of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) shows that China’s involvement in the illegal drug trade is a deliberate policy.
According to the report, the Chinese government and the CCP provide tax subsidies to encourage their pharmaceutical companies to produce and export — for U.S. consumption — fentanyl and other deadly drugs that are illegal in China, the U.S. and around the world. the world
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This is an unbearable situation. The US should force China to stop producing these drugs by imposing a series of consequences on the actors involved.
Elementary tariff announced by Trump is an important first step. If this does not bring results, other tools are available – increasing tariffs; directing sanctions against the Chinese pharmaceutical companies involved and potentially indicting and seizing the assets of those companies; imposing sanctions on Chinese banks involved in drug laundering; and facilitating private lawsuits by fentanyl victims against Chinese drug companies.
The second major point in the drug supply chain is located in Mexico. Mexican cartels have become a “one-stop shop” for the processing and distribution of almost all illegal drugs entering the United States – synthetic drugs made in China, as well as cocaine from coca plants in Latin America.
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The experience of taking down Colombia’s Medellin and Cali cartels in the early 1990s shows that the US can take down these organizations if it gets directly involved, works with host governments and local forces, and uses all available national security and law enforcement tools.
But Mexico poses a particular problem. Using bribery and terror tactics, the cartels have intimidated and co-opted the government to the point that it is unwilling to confront them and prevent the US from taking effective action against them. And even if the Mexican government were willing to fight the cartels, their military and law enforcement agencies are so riddled with corruption that they cannot act effectively on their own.
Our country cannot tolerate the failure of a drug state at our border that is flooding America with poison. The only way forward is for the US to use its enormous economic leverage to force the Mexican government to take action against the cartels. President Trump’s announced tariff does just that.
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Because the Mexicans cannot do the job alone, dismantling the cartels will require a joint campaign in which the United States engages in direct action against the cartels, using the full range of our law enforcement, intelligence, and military capabilities. Mexican cartels are more like foreign terrorist groups like ISIS than the American mafia, and it’s time to confront them as a national security threat, not a law enforcement concern.
Attacking the source of the problem abroad does not mean that we should abandon our efforts to eliminate human trafficking operations within the United States. But progress abroad will yield exponentially greater results than anything we do at home. Trump’s tariff initiative shows that rather than abandoning America’s stubborn drug crisis and handing it over to his successor, Trump is prepared to fight it with decisive action.
