President Donald Trump has signed an executive order classifying illicit fentanyl and its core precursor chemicals as “weapons of mass destruction,” a move that reframes the U.S. overdose crisis as a matter of national security rather than public health.
“With this historic executive order I will sign today, we’re formally classifying fentanyl as a weapon of mass destruction, which is what it is,” Trump said during an Oval Office ceremony honoring military personnel assigned to border operations.
The order directs Attorney General Pam Bondi to immediately pursue investigations and prosecutions related to fentanyl trafficking and instructs the Departments of Defense, Homeland Security, Treasury and State to treat illicit fentanyl networks through the same legal and intelligence frameworks used for chemical weapons and nonproliferation threats. According to CNN, the order also authorizes expanded coordination with financial institutions and foreign governments tied to the manufacture or distribution of illicit fentanyl.
Trump repeatedly compared fentanyl to military weapons. “No bomb does what this is doing,” he said, claiming the drug kills between 200,000 and 300,000 people each year.
Federal data paints a narrower picture. The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reported an estimated 80,000 overdose deaths in 2024, with roughly 48,000 involving synthetic opioids, primarily fentanyl, figures cited by Agence France-Presse.
While fentanyl remains the leading driver of overdose deaths in the U.S., overall fatalities declined to their lowest level in five years.
The executive order relies on existing legal definitions that describe weapons of mass destruction as tools capable of causing death through toxic chemicals. By explicitly placing fentanyl in that category, the administration opens the door to extraordinary enforcement authorities, including the potential use of military resources to assist civilian law enforcement under rarely used provisions of U.S. law. As The Independent notes, it remains legally unclear whether those …
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Author: Javier Hasse / High Times
