On December 15, President Donald Trump issued an executive order designating fentanyl “and its core precursors” as weapons of mass destruction (WMD). It’s the culmination of at least seven years of the federal government pushing this narrative in order to tap into counter-WMD funding, and a stepping stone in the current administration’s push to militarize the drug war.
The drug war, not being a formally declared war, is a matter of law enforcement—not the military. But per the order, Secretary Pete Hegseth and Attorney General Pam Bondi will determine whether “enhanced national security resources” available to the recently renamed Department of War should also be available to the Department of Justice during a WMD emergency.
“Illicit fentanyl is closer to a chemical weapon than a narcotic,” the order states. “Further, the potential for fentanyl to be weaponized for concentrated, large-scale terror attacks by organized adversaries is a serious threat to the United States.”
It is a nonexistent threat to the United States. The takeaway from the constantly cited 2002 Moscow theater attack, the only credible report of fentanyl being used as a WMD, is that this is not a substance conducive to being deployed through the air. But the myth of passive, secondhand fentanyl exposure has been successfully conflated with the myth of imminent fentanyl-based terrorist attacks, because the government has invested a ton of resources into doing so.
The Biomedical Advanced Research and Development Authority (BARDA) has been working to position fentanyl as a chemical weapon since at least 2018, using WMD-specific funding streams like Project BioShield to create an artificial need for unnecessarily risky opioid overdose reversal products.
State- and federal-level efforts to designate fentanyl a WMD have been gaining momentum for years. An Ohio bill calling for the designation had its third House committee hearing in November. And notably, in 2019 a leaked Department of Homeland Security memo showed James F. McDonnell, DHS assistant secretary for countering weapons of mass destruction, briefing then-Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen on a recent proposal to designate fentanyl a WMD.
“Fentanyl’s high toxicity and increasing availability are attractive to threat actors seeking nonconventional materials for a chemical weapons attack,” McDonnell wrote. “DHS/CWMD is in a position to help coordinate and leverage efforts from across DHS and the broader federal CWMD enterprise toward the fentanyl problem set. Relevant activities include using tools from the CWMD community for supply chain interruption.”
“No bomb does what this is doing,” Trump claimed.
In July, Trump signed the HALT Fentanyl Act, permanently banning fentanyl analogs under Schedule I of the Controlled Substances Act, after years of temporary scheduling orders being extended again and again. The White House referred to the new WMD designation as “taking the fight to the next level.”
In November, the White House released a national security strategy calling on Western Hemisphere governments to “cooperate with us against narco-terrorists, cartels and other transnational criminal organizations” as the US works to “control migration” and “stop drug flows.”
“No bomb does what this is doing—200,000 to 300,000 people die every year,” Trump stated at a December 15 event prior to signing the executive order. “That we know of.”
Fentanyl purity has dropped precipitously over the past year, according to recent data from DEA seizures. In the US, fentanyl was involved in 42,233 deaths between April 2024 and April 2025. That we know of. In September, Trump claimed that “300 million people died … from drugs” in 2024. That would be almost the entire US population, and about five times as many people as died that year from anything anywhere in the world.
Various media outlets have reported that the WMD designation is essentially a PR stunt unlikely to have practical impact—because fentanyl isn’t actually being developed as a chemical weapon, because executive orders don’t rewrite laws, etc. Everything Trump does is about optics, sure, and the order can certainly be viewed as a legal veneer for the administration doing what it was going to do already.
But its function is to unlock counter-WMD funding and use wartime resources to arm law enforcement. The designation will support the ongoing boat strikes and escalating campaign against Venezuela, which is not a main player in the global fentanyl supply chain, and inevitable drone strikes into Mexico. Counter-WMD military sensors will increasingly be used for enforcement at the southern border. It’s hard to not see a practical impact in that.
Image via California Governor’s Office of Emergency Services
