Why China and Mexico Are the Right Targets for POTUS Attack on the Scourge of Illegal Drugs

by William P. Barr & John P. Walters – 23 Jan 2025 | Hudson Institute

(This article forwarded to NDPA by Drug Free Australia)

 

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 choke off the growing

scourge of illegal drugs than all steps taken in the “drug war” to date.

 

Over the past few years, the flow of illegal narcotics into our country has

become a tsunami, with seizures of fentanyl pills skyrocketing from 4

million in 2020 to 115 million last year. The devastation inflicted on

American society by this traffic is catastrophic.

 

The opioid crisis alone costs us over 100,000 overdose deaths and $1.5

trillion annually, while the flood of potent methamphetamine from Mexico

fuels a new wave of meth addiction, ravaging lives, families and

neighborhoods in its wake.

 

This deadly traffic happens by weakening our border defenses and ignoring

opportunities to choke off the supply chain for illicit drugs, now centered

in China and Mexico.

 

The U.S. policy has focused on “harm reduction” inside the U.S. – deploying

overdose medications, like Naxolone, and funding more treatment for

addiction. While these steps are unobjectionable in themselves, they are an

inadequate response to the flood of poison we are confronting. It is like

addressing violent crime by offering more bandages.

 

Real progress requires eliminating the drug supply at its source. Here the

U.S. has a golden opportunity because the supply chain for drugs poisoning

America has become highly concentrated and vulnerable. It depends entirely

on illegal activities in two countries – the manufacture of illicit drugs in

Communist China, and drug processing and distribution operations in the

cartels’ safe havens in Mexico.

 

All these illegal activities are carried out with – and indeed require – the

connivance or willful blindness of the host governments. As Trump’s

announced tariffs show, the U.S. has the tools and leverage to compel China

and Mexico to shut down these operations. Doing this would strike a decisive

blow: once these operations are dismantled, it would be impossible to

replicate them elsewhere at anywhere near their current scale.

 

China has become the hub of illegal drug production because illegal

narcotics are increasingly synthesized chemically, rather than made from

grown plants. China offers the two prerequisites needed to supply the U.S.

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 virtually all the

fentanyl and other synthetic opioids, as well as 80% of the methamphetamine,

that come into the U.S. and are producing a new wave of drugs worse than

fentanyl, like nitazenes and xylazines (“tranq”). Simply put, without

China’s production, America’s drug problem would be mere fraction of what it

is.

 

Communist China could easily stop this activity if it wanted to. But a

recent report by 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 has been

granting tax subsidies to encourage their drug companies to produce and

export – for consumption in the U.S. – fentanyl and other death-dealing

drugs that are illegal in China, the U.S. and throughout the world.

 

This is an intolerable situation. The U.S. must compel China to stop

producing these drugs by imposing an escalating series of consequences on

those involved.

 

The initial tariff announced by Trump is a critical first step. If it

doesn’t get results, further tools are available – imposing higher tariffs;

targeting sanctions against the Chinese drug companies involved, and

potentially indicting and seizing assets of those companies; sanctioning

Chinese banks found to be involved in laundering drug money; and

facilitating private lawsuits by fentanyl victims against Chinese companies

making the drugs.

 

The second major chokepoint in the drug supply chain lies in Mexico. The

Mexican cartels have become the “one-stop-shop” for processing and

distributing nearly all the illegal drugs coming into the U.S. – the

synthetic drugs made in China, as well as the cocaine from coca plants in

Latin America. Experience eliminating the Colombian Medellin and Cali

cartels in the early 1990s shows that the U.S. can dismantle these

organizations when it becomes directly involved, works jointly with the host

governments and local forces, and uses all available national security and

law enforcement tools.

 

But Mexico poses a particular challenge. Using bribery and terrorist

tactics, the cartels have cowed and co-opted the government to the point

that it is unwilling to confront them nor allow the U.S. to take effective

action against them. And, even if the Mexican government was willing to

tackle the cartels, their military and law enforcement is so rife with

corruption they are incapable of effective action by themselves.

 

Our country cannot tolerate a failed narco-state on our border flooding

America with poison. The only way forward is for the U.S. to use its massive

economic leverage to compel the Mexican government to take a stand against

the cartels. President Trump’s announced tariff does just this.

 

Because the Mexicans cannot do the job themselves, eliminating the cartels

will require a joint campaign through which the U.S. engages in direct

action against the cartels, using a range of our law enforcement,

intelligence and military capabilities. The Mexican cartels are more like

foreign terrorist groups, like ISIS, than they are the American mafia – and

it is heartening that President Trump has signed an executive order

designating them as such. It is time to confront them as national-security

threats, not a law-enforcement matter.

 

Attacking the source of the problem overseas does not mean we should pull

back from trying to dismantle trafficking operations inside the U.S. But

progress abroad will produce exponentially greater results than anything we

do at home. Trump’s tariff initiative shows, that, rather than dither with

America’s stubborn drug crisis and passing it on to his successor, Trump is

willing to tackle it head on with decisive action.

Source: https://drugfree.org.au/index.php

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