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This is an edition of The Atlantic Daily, a newsletter that guides you through the biggest stories of the day, helps you discover new ideas, and recommends the best in culture. Sign up for it here.<\/p>\n
For months, President Donald Trump\u2019s crusade against the drug trade has carried the threat of violence: \u201cI think we\u2019re just going to kill people that are bringing drugs into our country,\u201d he said in October. Yesterday, hours before his administration announced that the United States had conducted three more strikes on alleged drug boats, he designated fentanyl as a weapon of mass destruction\u2014a move that could help him further justify the deadly conflict.<\/p>\n
Under U.S. law, the definition of a WMD is broad enough to encompass incendiary bombs, rockets, grenades, biological agents, toxins, and other weapons that \u201ccan have a large-scale impact on people, property, or infrastructure.\u201d Lawmakers have pushed to classify fentanyl as a WMD in the past; the drug belongs to the category of synthetic opioids, which accounted for roughly 48,000 deaths in the U.S. last year (approximately 60 percent of all overdose deaths). The idea was discussed and eventually abandoned during Trump\u2019s first term and under Joe Biden\u2014but ongoing military activity in the Caribbean and political tensions with Venezuela may have given Trump a reason to reverse course.<\/p>\n
On his first day of his second term in office, Trump signed an executive order designating certain drug cartels as terrorist organizations. And since early September, the U.S. has launched 25 known attacks against boats that officials have claimed were carrying illicit drugs; at least 95 people have been killed, and at least one strike may have been a war crime. \u201cKilling cartel members who poison our fellow citizens is the highest and best use of our military,\u201d Vice President J. D. Vance wrote after the strikes began. \u201cEvery boat kills 25,000 on average\u2014some people say more,\u201d Trump said in September. \u201cThese boats, they\u2019re stacked up with bags of white powder that\u2019s mostly fentanyl and other drugs, too.\u201d Never mind that some of the slain may not have worked for cartels, or that no evidence of fentanyl has been found on these boats: Cocaine and marijuana, not fentanyl, represent the majority of drugs intercepted on the high seas.<\/p>\n
Yesterday\u2019s reclassification of fentanyl may not grant the president special power to authorize new military activity, or to unilaterally declare war. But it is a rhetorical escalation that reaffirms this administration\u2019s posture in the armed conflict that\u2019s already under way. Similar to how WMDs were used as a pretext for the Iraq War, Trump is \u201cusing that same language, that same authority to be able to do what he wants,\u201d Christopher Sabatini, a senior research fellow at the think tank Chatham House, told me. It\u2019s a \u201cpublic relations\u201d tactic, according to Regina LaBelle, a professor of addiction policy at Georgetown University. The reclassification may be playing on the public\u2019s understanding of WMDs as a global, existential threat: the kind of thing a country could go to war over.<\/p>\n
In apparent contravention of Trump\u2019s campaign promise to extract the country from foreign conflicts, the U.S. has mounted a large-scale military buildup off the coast of Venezuela. An estimated 10,000 troops and 6,000 sailors are now deployed on Navy warships, including an aircraft carrier. Last week, the U.S. seized a Venezuelan oil tanker. Trump said on Friday that he will be \u201cstarting\u201d land strikes on drug operations in Latin American countries, Venezuela among them, although he hasn\u2019t said when. And he has explicitly threatened Venezuela\u2019s autocratic leader, President Nicol\u00e1s Maduro: When asked last week whether he\u2019d push for regime change, Trump said that Maduro\u2019s \u201cdays are numbered.\u201d<\/p>\n
The new designation for fentanyl was \u201cpart of trying to put forward some sort of justification for taking military action,\u201d Paul Poast, a University of Chicago political-science professor, told me. But if that justification was aimed in part at Venezuela, as some experts have suggested, it\u2019s not a very good one. The illicit fentanyl now flooding the U.S. doesn\u2019t come here through Venezuela; most of it is manufactured in Mexico. The fact that Venezuela wasn\u2019t explicitly invoked in yesterday\u2019s announcement could also indicate that the executive order is a \u201csignal that\u2019s being sent to governments and transnational criminals in Latin America to watch out\u2014you could be next,\u201d Sabatini said.<\/p>\n
Perhaps a bigger problem with the classification of fentanyl as a WMD is that unlike, say, sarin gas, it is not actually being used as a weapon. Although a chemical can be a WMD, \u201cthe vast majority of time when Americans die because of a fentanyl overdose, it was not an intentional outcome,\u201d Jonathan Caulkins, a policy professor at Carnegie Mellon, explained. Fentanyl has been used as a weapon at least once: During the Moscow-theater hostage crisis in 2002, Russian Spetsnaz commandos deployed fentanyl in gas form, killing the Chechan terrorists and many of the hostages too. But just because the drug can be deadly on a large scale doesn\u2019t necessarily mean it is a WMD. \u201cWe don\u2019t use that term for cigarettes, bullets, cars,\u201d Caulkins said\u2014each of which also causes tens of thousands of deaths every year.<\/p>\n
Although the WMD designation may not have immediate legal implications for Trump\u2019s military powers, it could potentially change how domestic drug cases are prosecuted. The use of a WMD against people or property in the U.S. carries a maximum sentence of life in prison; if someone dies, prosecutors can argue for the death penalty. According to research co-authored by LaBelle, that could impose \u201ca life sentence on any person who uses drugs laced with illicitly manufactured fentanyl, or anyone who gives drugs laced with illicitly manufactured fentanyl to their friend.\u201d As of now, the Trump administration has offered no guidance on how this might play out.<\/p>\n
Although the reclassification of fentanyl reinforces Trump\u2019s position against drug trafficking, it may not do much on its own to solve the opioid crisis. Overdose deaths have been declining in the U.S. since before Trump took office, long before the boat strikes began. Many theories have been proposed as to why\u2014but the escalation of armed conflict isn\u2019t one of them.<\/p>\n
Related:<\/p>\n
Here are three new stories from The Atlantic:<\/strong><\/p>\n Today\u2019s News<\/strong><\/p>\n Evening Read<\/strong><\/p>\n Bill Tompkins \/ Getty<\/p>\n The Savage Empathy of the Mosh Pit<\/p>\n By James Parker<\/p>\n Hot autumn night has fallen over Worcester, Massachusetts, over the huge, baked asphalt lot behind the Palladium, the ancestral seat of the Northeast\u2019s heavy-metal kingdom. This is the New England Metal and Hardcore Festival, 25 bands on three stages, 10 unbroken hours of heavy music, and all day, I\u2019ve been watching the pit\u2014the mosh pit, the area close to the stage where inflamed dancers whirl and collide. I\u2019ve been watching it, and skulking around it journalistically, because I am possessed by an idea: What if the pit, this ritualized maelstrom at the heart of the hardcore-metal crowd, could teach us something about how to live together in 2025\u2014about how to be?<\/p>\n Read the full article.<\/p>\n More From The Atlantic<\/em><\/p>\n Culture Break<\/p>\n Illustration by Paul Spella \/ The Atlantic. Source: Todd Owyoung \/ NBC \/ Getty.<\/p>\n Explore. Confessional outbursts after a failed relationship have a long history\u2014and some people do them better than others, Anna Holmes writes.<\/p>\n Read. Dara T. Mathis writes about what people don\u2019t understand about Black nationalism.<\/p>\n Play our daily crossword.<\/p>\n Explore all of our newsletters here.<\/em><\/p>\n Rafaela Jinich contributed to this newsletter.<\/p>\n When you buy a book using a link in this newsletter, we receive a commission. Thank you for supporting <\/em>The Atlantic.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" This is an edition of The Atlantic Daily, a newsletter that guides you through the biggest stories of the day, helps you discover new ideas, and recommends the best in culture. Sign up for it here. For months, President Donald Trump\u2019s crusade against the drug trade has carried the threat of violence: \u201cI think we\u2019re<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":37827,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[55],"tags":[4295,1472,2449],"class_list":{"0":"post-37826","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-social-issues","8":"tag-destruction","9":"tag-mass","10":"tag-weapon"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/37826","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=37826"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/37826\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/37827"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=37826"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=37826"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=37826"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}\n