Lone Candle

“If stopping the flow of illegal drugs is as straightforward as Trump implies, one might wonder, why didn’t he do that during his first term? “I’m going to create borders,” he promised during his 2016 campaign. “No drugs are coming in. We’re gonna build a wall. You know what I’m talking about. You have confidence in me. Believe me, I will solve the problem.”
Trump did not, in fact, solve the problem. According to data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the annual number of drug-related deaths in the United States rose by 44 percent between 2016 and Trump’s last year in office.

As drug warriors have been discovering since Congress banned nonmedical use of opiates and cocaine in 1914, prohibition creates a strong financial incentive to evade any obstacles that the government manages to erect between suppliers and consumers. That problem is compounded in the case of fentanyl, which is cheap to produce and highly potent, making it possible to smuggle large numbers of doses in small packages.”

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“Mexican drug cartels “move illicit fentanyl into the United States, primarily across the southwestern border, often in passenger vehicles,” the CRS reports. “The U.S.

Department of Homeland Security asserts that 90% of [seized] fentanyl is interdicted at ports of entry, often in vehicles driven by U.S. citizens. A primary challenge for both
Mexican and U.S. officials charged with stopping the fentanyl flow is that [the cartels] can meet U.S. demand with a relatively small amount.”

Finding those small amounts among the hundreds of thousands of cars and trucks that cross into the United States from Canada and Mexico each day is a daunting task.”

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” Even if the U.S. “managed to stop 100 percent of direct [fentanyl] sales to the US, enterprising dealers [would] simply sell into nations such as the UK, repackage the product, and then resell it into the US,” economist Roger Bate noted in a 2018 American Enterprise Institute report. “Intercepting all packages from the UK and other EU nations to the US will not be possible.” And “whether or not drugs are available to the general public via the mail,” Bate added, “drug dealers have domestic production and overland and sea routes and other courier services that deliver the product to the US.””

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“after Trump had four years to deliver on his promise that “no drugs” would be “coming in” during his administration. Yet he now claims that Mexican and Canadian officials could accomplish what he manifestly failed to do if only they tried harder.”

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“Even if severe legal penalties were enough to deter all Chinese suppliers of fentanyl precursors, that would not be the end of the story. As The New York Times recently noted, Mexican cartels already have a backup plan: They are recruiting “chemistry students studying at Mexican universities” so they can “synthesize the chemical compounds, known as precursors, that are essential to making fentanyl, freeing them from having to import those raw materials from China.””
https://reason.com/2024/12/11/trumps-plan-to-fight-illegal-drugs-with-punitive-tariffs-makes-no-sense/