This week, President Trump declared fentanyl a ‘weapon of mass destruction’, not merely a schedule 2 drug. So what does this mean? Wasn’t the administration serious about stopping the fentanyl threat before? Only now will the Attorney General and Treasury Department pursue parties engaged in the import and production of fentanyl products? No, this has to do with allowing the Defense Department to use its resources to pursue threats abroad. Which would be significant if they were pursuing those threats (in Mexico, where fentanyl is sourced) as opposed to pursuing non-fentanyl threats off the coast of Venezuela. So does this declaration have any particular impact on fentanyl use and deaths? Will there be, for instance, targeting of social media platforms that are used to sell drugs laced with fentanyl? Unlikely – Trump and the Social Media bros are best buds! Will local officials receive greater resources to pursue drug distribution rings? Don’t hold your breath. Will the administration pursue federal laws that increase and/or federalize penalties related to the distribution of fentanyl laced drugs? This administration appears to have an allergy to working with Congress to institute statutory solutions to anything.

Is fentanyl a weapon of mass destruction? Well, the GAO indicates that weapons of mass destruction are weapons that have the potential to kill thousands of people in a single attack. Sure, fentanyl could be aerosolized and become such a weapon (or at least carfentanil can). But this is not typically how fentanyl is used. In fact, the makers of fentanyl do not desire the death of their customers at all – like most addictive drugs, the desire of the purveyors of the drug is to make a profit on its continued use. A dead customer doesn’t buy drugs. The definitions under US statutes work against the classification of fentanyl as a WMD. But it sounds threatening, doesn’t it? And it sounds like there is decisive action taking place to save lives. And it distracts from the President’s pardon of an actual drug kingpin (Juan Orlando Hernandez), a founder of a platform for online illicit drug sales (Ross Ulbricht), and a Baltimore drug kingpin in cocaine (Garnett Gilbert Smith).

But as long as we are re-writing the definition of WMD, we may wish to target perpetrators that managed to accomplish the following in 2025:

a) The destruction of food aid instead of handing it over to food non-profits for distribution – could have fed 1.5 million children for a week.

b) The destruction of 15,000 pounds of food in Georgia (bought and paid for by American taxpayers, to fight famine in Sudan) that could have helped feed 60 million people.

c) How about economic destruction – business and non-business bankruptcies are soaring.

d) How about employment destruction – the unemployment rate is now 4.6%, the highest rate since July 2021 (when we had a pandemic ebbing). Layoffs reported through the month of November total nearly 1.2M – a 54% increase over the same period in 2024.

As it happens, all of these destructive events occurred under the same regime – the Trump Administration. Can we declare them weapons of mass destruction?

And the national disgrace continues…