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Just 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 narcotics from those countries is stopped. These measures will do more to suppress the growing scourge of illegal drugs than any steps taken to date in the ‘drug war’.
In recent years, the flow of illegal narcotics into our country has become a tsunami seizures from fentanyl pills increases from 4 million in 2020 to 115 million last year. The devastation this traffic is causing to American society is catastrophic.
The opioid crisis alone is costing us more than 100,000 overdose deaths and $1.5 trillion a year, while the flow of powerful methamphetamine from Mexico is fueling a new wave of meth addiction, destroying lives, families and neighborhoods in its wake.
President Trump’s actions will do more to quell the growing scourge of illegal drugs than any steps taken to date in the “drug war.” (Saul Loeb/AFP via Getty Images)
The Biden administration has enabled this deadly trade by weakening our border defenses and ignoring opportunities to choke the illicit drug supply chain, now concentrated in China and Mexico.
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Instead, it has focused on “harm reduction” in the US – deploying overdose drugs like Naxolone and funding more addiction treatment. While these steps are not objectionable in themselves, they are an inadequate response to the flood of poison we face. It’s like tackling violent crime by offering more bandages.
Real progress requires eliminating the drug supply at its source. Here the US has a golden opportunity because the supply chain for drugs that are poisoning America has become highly concentrated and vulnerable. It depends entirely on illegal activities in two countries: the production of illegal drugs Communist Chinaand drug processing and distribution operations in the cartels’ safe havens in Mexico.
All of these illegal activities are carried out with – and even require – the complicity or willful blindness of host governments. As Trump’s announced tariffs demonstrate, the US has the tools and power to force China and Mexico to halt these operations. This would deal a decisive blow: once these operations are dismantled, it would be impossible to replicate them elsewhere, on approximately their current scale.
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China has become the center of illicit drug production as illicit narcotics are increasingly chemically synthesized rather than made from mature plants. China provides the two conditions needed to supply the US market: a large chemical industrial base and a government willing to allow its factories to make illegal narcotics and their precursors on a large scale.
Chinese factories make the essential ingredients for almost all products fentanyl and other synthetic opioidsas well as 80% of the methamphetamine entering the US, producing a new wave of drugs worse than fentanyl, such as nitazenes and xylazines (“tranq”). Simply put, without Chinese manufacturing, America’s drug problem would be a fraction of what it is today.
Communist China could easily stop this activity if it wanted to. But a recent report from the bipartisan Select Committee on the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) shows that China’s participation in the illegal drug trade is a deliberate policy.
According to the report, the Chinese government and the CCP have provided tax subsidies to encourage their pharmaceutical companies to produce and export fentanyl and other deadly drugs – for consumption in the US – that are illegal in China, the US and around the world . world.
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This is an unbearable situation. The US must force China to stop producing these drugs by imposing an escalating series of consequences on those involved.
The initial tariff announced by Trump is a crucial first step. If this does not yield results, other tools are available – imposing higher rates; imposing sanctions on the Chinese pharmaceutical companies involved, and possibly suing and seizing assets of those companies; punishing Chinese banks found to be involved in drug money laundering; and facilitating private lawsuits by fentanyl victims against Chinese companies that make the drugs.
The second major bottleneck in the drug supply chain is in Mexico. Mexico’s cartels have become the one-stop shop for processing and distributing nearly all illegal drugs entering the U.S. – the synthetic drugs made in China, as well as the cocaine from coca plants in Latin America.
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The experience of eliminating the Colombian Medellin and Cali cartels in the early 1990s shows that the US can dismantle these organizations if it becomes directly involved, works with host governments and local military forces, and uses all available national security resources and law enforcement tools.
But Mexico poses a special challenge. Using bribery and terrorist tactics, the cartels have intimidated and co-opted the government to the point that it is no longer willing to confront them or allow the US to take effective action against them. And even if the Mexican government were willing to take on the cartels, their military and law enforcement are so riddled with corruption that they are incapable of effective action on their own.
Our country cannot tolerate a failed narco-state on our border flooding America with poison. The only way out is for the US to use its enormous economic influence to force the Mexican government to take a stand against the cartels. President Trump’s announced tariff does exactly this.
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Because the Mexicans cannot do this work themselves, eliminating the cartels will require a concerted campaign in which the U.S. takes direct action against the cartels, using a range of our law enforcement, intelligence, and military capabilities. The Mexican cartels resemble foreign terrorist groups, such as ISIS, more than the American mafia, and it is time to confront them as national security threats, and not as a law enforcement issue.
Addressing the source of the problem abroad does not mean withdrawing from efforts to dismantle human trafficking operations within the US. But progress abroad will yield exponentially greater results than anything we do at home. Trump’s tariff initiative shows that rather than dithering on America’s intractable drug crisis and passing it on to his successor, Trump is willing to tackle it with decisive action.
