For the Right, Fentanyl Isn't a Problem. It's a Cudgel.

Earlier this month, President Trump added a well-worn justification for his favorite economic policy: the “fentanyl tariff.“ Originally planning on “Tariffing the value of this horrible and deadly drug in order to make it more costly to distribute and buy,” the administration has now reworked the idea (presumably after realizing criminals don’t pay tariffs) into a vague scheme to strongarm China, Mexico and Canada into non-specific fentanyl enforcement actions via trade policy.

The merits of the policy are questionable: Canada, for instance, accounts for less than 1% of the US illicit fentanyl market, while China’s “fentanyl tariff“ accounts for around 4% of new tariffs that they’re not blinking at. They’re easy to justify, however, if you understand what the modern-day conservative movement actually means when it talks about fentanyl.

Fentanyl: The Right’s Policy Genie

Past addiction crises were easy for the conservative movement. As the right increasingly shifted towards a view of public spending as solely a means of caging and killing people, dismissing drug epidemics as moral failings or symptoms of inherently defective communities took trivial effort when those communities were never (crack cocaine) or always (meth) going to vote for Republicans anyway. Opioids, however, cut too wide a swath of the populace for that; blaming addiction on moral failings or community culture probably doesn’t sit too well with vital middle-class voters as they’re burying their sons, daughters and neighbors. The old saws won’t work, but a party that fundamentally believes in public spending only to cage and kill people designedly cannot afford to treat it any other way.

The answer, so far, has been to repurpose opioid-related grief as anger at typical conservative villains, to be cured by the advancement of conservative priorities. Tackling addiction doesn’t mean meeting users where they are, it means wanton executions in the supply chains. Fentanyl trafficking folds neatly into Trump’s mass deportation and wall-building campaigns, even if it primarily occurs via ports of entry and by US citizens. As I wrote about another example of this tendency (Florida’s attempt to punish chemically impossible “opioid exposures“):

Perhaps nothing better demonstrates Trump’s understanding of the crisis (or how he can use it) than his decision to staff one of the most important offices dealing with it. In March, President Donald Trump nominated former Fox News contributor Sara A. Carter to direct the White House Office of National Drug Control Policy, a position better known as the President’s “drug czar.“ While the position doesn’t carry any enforcement authority of its own, the Executive Branch carries a ton of authority in how the nation handles its drug problem, and the office essentially sets the direction that branch’s agencies will take, for good or ill. Carter has no experience in healthcare, public health, law enforcement, or any other government function; as Alexander Lekhtman notes for Filter, she does bring significant experience as a drug-war propagandist:

Trump Supercharges the Fentanyl Response That Failed, and Gutted the One That Works

The most frustrating thing about this is that applying opioid-focused solutions to the opioid crisis, as I’ve noted before, was working. Last year the CDC reported a % decrease in national opioid overdose deaths, with as much as a 30% decrease in individual states. That happened amid higher immigration (documented and otherwise), but also cheaper naloxone, more access to fentanyl test strips, wider medication-assisted treatment availability, and community education and surveillance. The new administration’s response: take a hammer to all of that, and hope labor camps fix it.

It’s hard not to notice the perverse incentive here. If what you really want is autarky and mass deportations, the presence of a crisis that can be massaged to justify those is a precious thing. While murders committed by undocumented immigrants have some political salience, their low prevalence make them an inconvenient wedge (especially weighed against the atrocities cosigned by the Mass Deportation Fan Club.) People not dying of opioids risks the loss of a crucial wedge for the right. People continuing to die of opioids appears to be an acceptable cost.

UPDATE: since the original publication, the Trump administration has announced plans to end additional naloxone access programs.

1  Though it wasn’t primarily a drug issue, the Reagan-era apathy toward the AIDS crisis also bears mention here.