Trump declares fentanyl a weapon of mass destruction

Huge difference between a terrorist killing people with a nuclear bomb and a person voluntarily taking a drug that he knows is risky and then dying from it.

“President Donald Trump signed an executive order Monday classifying fentanyl as a weapon of mass destruction, giving the U.S. government additional legal firepower in its efforts to combat illegal trafficking of the synthetic drug.

The executive order cites the lethality of the drug, which kills tens of thousands of Americans every year, and the fact that transnational criminal groups the Trump administration has designated as foreign terrorist organizations use the sale of fentanyl to fund activities that undermine U.S. national security.”

https://www.politico.com/news/2025/12/15/trump-fentanyl-weapon-mass-destruction-00691742?media_author_id=63054589126&media_id=3788579575710098494_63054589126&ranking_info_token=GCA0Y2IzY2U2NTEyYmQ0NGNhYjM4Zjc3ZTA1YjVhOWJiNiX2tbwFFZADFurohpQNGBMzNzg4NTc5NTc1NzEwMDk4NDk0KANydmEA

Trump Orders Blockade Over Stolen Land and Oil

The reasons for current military action against Venezuela given by Trump and his allies are various. And the list of reasons to justify war sound a lot like Putin before and after invading Ukraine and W Bush before and after invading Iraq. Reasons for action in Venezuela include: drugs, terrorism, the influence of Russia and Iran, stolen land, stolen oil, opening up Venezuelan oil to American companies, and Maduro being the illegitimate ruler of Venezuela.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=73ocuj4Adtw

Boat Attack Commander Says He Had To Kill 2 Survivors Because They Were Still Trying To Smuggle Cocaine

“the goal of disrupting and deterring drug smuggling would not justify a policy of summarily executing criminal suspects without statutory authorization or any semblance of due process. That is why Trump is trying to justify his bloodthirsty anti-drug strategy by calling his targets “combatants” in a “non-international armed conflict”—a term he has stretched beyond recognition.

Congress has not recognized that purported “armed conflict,” and it is a counterintuitive label for the unilateral violence exemplified by the September 2 attack. The boat that Bradley destroyed, which reportedly “turned around before the attack started because the people onboard had apparently spotted a military aircraft stalking it,” was not engaged in any sort of attack on American targets and offered no resistance. The same was true of the vessels destroyed in subsequent attacks on suspected drug boats

The violence in such attacks is so one-sided that the government’s lawyers claim blowing up drug boats does not constitute “hostilities” under the War Powers Resolution because U.S. personnel face no plausible risk of casualties. So we are talking about an “armed conflict” that does not involve “hostilities” yet somehow does involve enemy “combatants.”

Unless you accept that baffling premise, the attempt to justify Bradley’s second strike under the law of war is incomprehensible. “Two U.S. officials have said the military intercepted radio communications from the survivors to suspected cartel members, raising the possibility that any drugs on the boat that had not burned up in the first blast could have been retrieved,” The New York Times reports. “The military, they said, interpreted the purported distress call as meaning the survivors were still ‘in the fight’ and so were not shipwrecked.”

In reality, of course, those men were not “in the fight” to begin with, because there was no “fight.” A unilateral act of aggression by U.S. forces hardly amounts to a battle, and it is hard to see how a radio call for help qualifies as the sort of “hostile act” that the Defense Department’s manual says excludes someone from “shipwrecked” status. To illustrate that exception, the manual notes that “shipwrecked persons do not include combatant personnel engaged in amphibious, underwater, or airborne attacks who are proceeding ashore.””

https://reason.com/2025/12/04/boat-attack-commander-says-he-had-to-kill-2-survivors-because-they-were-still-trying-to-smuggle-cocaine/

The ‘Threat’ That Supposedly Justified Killing 2 Boat Attack Survivors Was Entirely Speculative

“While the renewed congressional interest in the legal and moral justification for Trump’s bloodthirsty anti-drug strategy is welcome, that inquiry should not be limited to the question of whether one particular attack violated the law of war.

The details of Bradley’s defense nevertheless illustrate the outrageous implications of conflating drug smuggling with violent aggression. He argues that the seemingly helpless men in the water, who were blown apart by a second missile while clinging to the boat’s smoldering wreckage, still posed a threat because they could have recovered and delivered whatever cocaine might have remained after the first strike.

In reality, there was no “fight” to stay in. The violence exemplified by this attack is so one-sided that the government’s lawyers claim blowing up drug boats does not constitute “hostilities” under the War Powers Resolution because U.S. personnel face no plausible risk of casualties. So we are talking about an “armed conflict” that does not involve “hostilities” yet somehow does involve enemy “combatants”—who, contrary to that label, are not actually engaged in combat.

Bradley seems to have determined that the flailing men were engaged in a “hostile act” simply by existing near a boat remnant that might have contained salvageable cocaine. As ridiculous as that position is, it is only a bit more risible than Trump’s assertion that supplying cocaine to Americans amounts to “an armed attack against the United States” that justifies a lethal military response.

“There is a risk that the focus on the second strike and specifically the talk of ‘war crimes’ feeds into the administration’s false wartime framing and veils the fact that the entire boat-strikes campaign is murder, full stop,” Cardozo School of Law professor Rebecca Ingber, an expert on the law of war, told The New York Times. “The administration’s evolving justification for the second strike only lays bare the absurdity of their legal claims for the campaign as a whole—that transporting drugs is somehow the equivalent of wartime hostilities.””

https://reason.com/2025/12/05/the-threat-that-supposedly-justified-killing-2-boat-attack-survivors-was-entirely-speculative/

Trump Is Still Claiming He Saves ‘25,000 American Lives’ When He Blows Up a Suspected Drug Boat

“These bogus numbers would be merely amusing if Trump were not deploying them to justify a policy of killing suspected cocaine couriers, at a distance and in cold blood, without legal authorization or any semblance of due process.”

https://reason.com/2025/12/09/trump-is-still-claiming-he-saves-25000-american-lives-when-he-blows-up-a-suspected-drug-boat/

Trump’s Word Games Can’t Conceal the Murderous Reality of His Anti-Drug Strategy

“calling a drug smuggler a combatant does not make him a combatant. That reality goes to the heart of the morally and legally bankrupt justification for President Donald Trump’s bloodthirsty anti-drug campaign in the Caribbean and the eastern Pacific, which began on September 2 and so far has killed 87 people in 22 attacks.

Trump conflates drug smuggling with violent aggression, saying it amounts to “an armed attack against the United States” that requires a lethal military response. According to that counterintuitive theory, suspected cocaine smugglers are “combatants” who can be killed at will, and their vessels pose a “threat” to national security that can be neutralized only by completely destroying them.

In reality, Americans want cocaine, and criminal organizations are happy to supply it. The government does not approve of that trade, which it has long sought to suppress by interdicting cocaine and arresting smugglers.”

https://reason.com/2025/12/10/trumps-word-games-cant-conceal-the-murderous-reality-of-his-anti-drug-strategy/

Psychoactive Hemp Products Will Be Federally Prohibited in a Year Unless Congress Intervenes

“Thanks to a bill approved as part of the package that ended the federal shutdown, intoxicating hemp products will be federally prohibited as of November 13, 2026, a year after President Donald Trump signed the legislation. Unless Congress intervenes, that ban will put an end to a $28 billion industry that offers psychoactive beverages, edibles, flower, and vape cartridges to consumers in dozens of states.”

https://reason.com/2025/11/24/psychoactive-hemp-products-will-be-federally-prohibited-in-a-year-unless-congress-intervenes/

They Built a Hemp Business in Good Faith but Washington Is About To Crush It

“As the Senate prepared to vote on the funding bill to reopen the federal government earlier this month, Sen. Rand Paul (R–Ky.) warned that passing the legislation would “regulate the hemp industry to death.” Buried deep inside the continuing resolution was a provision that would completely reverse nearly seven years of industry progress—and potentially wipe out small hemp-based businesses.

Under the new provision, any consumable hemp product must contain no more than 0.4 milligrams of total THC—not per serving or gram, but per entire container.

Paul is right: This new rule is a death sentence to the hemp industry. If allowed to stand, it could eliminate 95 percent of all hemp-derived cannabinoid products made in the United States.

The government should not destroy the livelihoods of countless Americans, and it most certainly should not pull the rug out from under a burgeoning industry less than a decade after giving hemp its blessing.

States are squeezing hemp from one side, and now Washington is crushing it from the other—and small businesses, like Cornbread, are stuck in the middle.”

https://reason.com/2025/11/30/they-built-a-hemp-business-in-good-faith-but-washington-is-about-to-crush-it/