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