President-elect Donald Trump says the special tariffs he has threatened to impose on goods imported from China, Canada, and Mexico are aimed at stopping illegal drugs from entering the United States. The federal government has been trying and failing to do that for more than a century, and there is no reason to think this puzzling tactic will be any more successful.
Trump complains that Canada and Mexico are not doing enough to prevent drugs from crossing the northern and southern borders. "Drugs are pouring in at levels never seen before, 10 times what we had," he told Kristen Welker on Meet the Press last Sunday, explaining the rationale for the punitive tariffs. "They're just pouring in. We can't have open borders."
Last month, Trump said he would encourage Canada and Mexico to crack down on those borders by imposing a 25 percent tariff on "ALL products coming into the United States." He said the tariffs, which he plans to impose on his first day in office, "will remain in effect until such time as Drugs, in particular Fentanyl, and all Illegal Aliens stop this Invasion of our Country!"
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.
"At present," the Congressional Research Service (CRS) noted last March, "most U.S.-destined illicit fentanyl appears to be produced clandestinely in Mexico, using chemical precursors from China." Although "some fentanyl precursors are subject to international controls," the report explains, "others may be produced and exported legally from certain countries, including China. Mexican customs officials reportedly have struggled to detect the illicit diversion of these chemicals."
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. Even attempting it in a serious way would impose intolerable burdens on international travel and trade. And although vehicular transportation across the southern border currently seems to be the main route for fentanyl, that is not the only option. Fentanyl also enters the United States by mail, and it is impossible to intercept all of those shipments, especially given their small size and the enormous volume of packages.
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."
In March 2021, two months after Trump left office, the Drug Enforcement Administration reported that "availability and use of cheap and highly potent fentanyl has increased." It also noted that methamphetamine's "purity and potency remain high while prices remain low" and that "availability of cocaine throughout the United States remains steady."
That was 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.
Trump also faults China for its lack of diligence. "I have had many talks with China about the massive amounts of drugs, in particular Fentanyl, being sent into the United States," he said on the same day that he announced the 25 percent tariff on goods imported from Canada and Mexico. "But to no avail. Representatives of China told me that they would institute their maximum penalty, that of death, for any drug dealers caught doing this but, unfortunately, they never followed through, and drugs are pouring into our Country, mostly through Mexico, at levels never seen before. Until such time as they stop, we will be charging China an additional 10% Tariff, above any additional Tariffs, on all of their many products coming into the United States of America."
Trump is enthusiastic about killing drug dealers, a position he has had trouble reconciling with his intermittent complaints about excessively harsh U.S. drug penalties. As Trump himself has admiringly noted, the Chinese government has already deemed fentanyl-related crimes worthy of death. "In China, unlike in our country, the highest level of crime is very, very high," Trump said in 2019. "You pay the ultimate price. So I appreciate that very much."
Contrary to what Trump implied, U.S. law does authorize the execution of drug traffickers in certain circumstances. Drug offenders eligible for the death penalty include leaders of criminal enterprises that sell 60,000 kilograms of marijuana, 60 kilograms of heroin, 17 kilograms of crack cocaine, or 600 grams of LSD.
That provision has been on the books since 1994, but it has never been carried out. It probably never will, since it seems to be unconstitutional under a 2008 decision in which the Supreme Court said the Eighth Amendment requires that the death penalty be reserved for "crimes that take the life of the victim." While deadly violence committed "in aid of racketeering activity" or "during and in relation to any…drug trafficking crime" would qualify for that description, nonviolent drug distribution seemingly would not.
China, by contrast, does periodically execute people for nonviolent drug offenses (and a long list of other crimes). If it did so more often, Trump seems to think, the flow of fentanyl into America would "stop." That assumption is hard to credit given the economics of prohibition, which creates a "risk premium" that is demonstrably large enough to compensate for the chance that any given trafficker will be apprehended and punished.
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."
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