Over the past decade, the synthetic drug fentanyl has devastated the United States, killing more than a quarter of a million Americans, making it, according to some officials, the deadliest drug in US history.

And over the past two months, even amid signs that the fentanyl crisis is starting to wane, the drug has also taken on an unexpectedly prominent role in American national security and economic policy.

The initial justification for the off-again, on-again tariffs on Canada and Mexico — as well as tariffs on China, which are in effect — cited what the White House said was these countries’ failure at “stopping poisonous fentanyl and other drugs from flowing into our country.” President Donald Trump agreed to delay the tariffs on Mexico and Canada after they promised steps to address the crisis, but they are once again scheduled to take effect this week.

The administration is also reportedly preparing an executive order that would designate fentanyl as a “weapon of mass destruction,” potentially paving the way for military action against drug cartels in Mexico. Trump talked repeatedly about the possibility of using military force on Mexican soil during his campaign and has already designated several cartels as “foreign terrorist organizations.” In recent congressional testimony, Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard cited fentanyl as a top threat to US national security.

Whether or not threatening tariffs and military action will actually stop fentanyl from entering the United States, Trump is correct about one thing: fentanyl is a global issue, and it takes a complex global shadow economy — involving labs in China and cartels in Mexico — to get these deadly chemicals onto US streets.

He made the fentanyl epidemic a major issue during his campaign, and anecdotally at least, his tough message seems to have resonated with families and communities affected by the drug.

But now that he’s in office, critics say his policies are unlikely to keep Americans from dying from fentanyl use, and in some cases, may be counterproductive — and that fentanyl is being used as a cover to provide a security rationale for Trump’s trade and immigration policies.

The fentanyl crisis, briefly explained

Fentanyl is a powerful synthetic opioid, meaning it is created in a lab from precursor chemicals, rather than being derived from a plant like traditional opium. It comes in a wide number of chemical variants. It was originally created by Belgian chemists in 1959 as an alternative to morphine, the dominant painkiller at the time. Fentanyl works faster, is more powerful, and less likely to cause nausea. It quickly caught on as an operating room anesthetic for surgery, and is still widely used for legitimate medical purposes today.

It is also extremely addictive, and its recreational use was placed under international control in the mid-1960s. Fentanyl first turned up as a street drug in California in the late 1970s, where it was misleadingly marketed by dealers as a purer form of heroin called “China white.”

But illegal fentanyl use in the United States didn’t really take off until decades later, on the heels of the larger American opioid crisis in the 1990s, when doctors began prescribing larger and larger quantities of newly available opioids like oxycontin for pain management. Many people who first became addicted to prescription painkillers later turned to illegal drugs like heroin, which Mexican cartels began bringing into the US in vastly larger quantities in the late 2000s.

Then, around 2012, fentanyl, far more powerful than heroin, began arriving in the United States. At first, it was shipped to dealers through the mail from chemical factories in China. Mexican cartels, sensing a business opportunity, quickly got into the fentanyl trade themselves.

Overdose deaths quickly skyrocketed. By 2016, it was the deadliest drug in the United States. Only a few milligrams of fentanyl can be lethal, and the fact that dealers often mix it with other drugs, like heroin, is part of what makes it so deadly: Users often don’t know how much fentanyl they’re taking, or that they’re taking it at all.

The opioid epidemic, exacerbated by the Covid pandemic........

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