President Donald Trump has signed an executive order designating fentanyl — a strong opioid painkiller that is widely-used in medical settings — as a weapon of mass destruction in what could be a major escalation in his administration’s efforts to topple the Venezuelan government.
Speaking in the Oval Office during a ceremony to award a long-dormant medal to soldiers and marines who’ve been deployed along the U.S.-Mexico border as part of his administration’s immigration crackdown, Trump acknowledged that the medication is “very important for medicine, for anesthesia [and][various other things.”
“When it’s mixed with certain things, it becomes bad,” he said.
The president claimed the “mixing” of fentanyl was taking place in Mexico and claimed his administration had seized “millions” of pills containing the drug in recent months. But after a long, unhinged digression about the governor of Colorado’s refusal to honor a pardon Trump purportedly issued to a former county clerk who was convicted of violating state election laws in a vain attempt to prove he won the 2020 election in that state, he claimed Venezuela and other countries were sending the drug to American shores deliberately to kill Americans instead of to make profits and satisfy demand for the illegal narcotic.
“There’s no doubt that America’s adversaries are trafficking fentanyl into the United States in part because they want to kill Americans. If this were a war, that would be one of the worst wars,” Trump said.
“They’ve destroyed a lot of families, because when they lose a child, or even if their child is heavily addicted, you lose that family, the family will never be the same.”
He said the order he was signing would be “one more step to protect Americans from the scourge of deadly fentanyl flooding into our country” by designating the drug as a weapon of mass destruction, which he claimed kills up to 300,000 people each year.
More follows…
Source: independent.co.uk