In what feels like a rerun of an old episode, President-elect Donald Trump has promised to impose new trade tariffs on China, Mexico and Canada in a late-night social media post. He explicitly linked this with the arrival of fentanyl in the United States, and reiterated his call for China to execute people for trafficking fentanyl.
“I have had many talks with China about the massive amounts of drugs, in particular Fentanyl, being sent into the United States – But to no avail,” Trump wrote on his Truth Social platform on November 25. “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,” he continued, “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.”
That’s on top of the 25 percent tariffs—taxes to be paid by importers on all goods entering the US—he has promised for all three countries.
Trump’s comments indicate how he plans to follow through, at least selectively, on his campaign promise to impose tariffs on all imported goods. Experts have said this is likely to fuel inflation, leaving US households worse off due to higher consumer prices. Democratic presidential candidate Kamala Harris previously described the plan as a “sales tax on the American people.”
Chinese government representatives pushed back on Trump’s linking the move to fentanyl, claiming that the country’s “extensive and in-depth anti-drug cooperation” with the US had achieved “remarkable results.”
“If you play this cat-and-mouse game, you may be launching a substitution war that could produce all kinds of new psychoactive substances.”
To what extent are fentanyl and the planned tariffs really connected?
Sanho Tree, a fellow at the Institute for Policy Studies and director of its Drug Policy Project, believes that for Trump, it’s tariffs first and fentanyl second—that he’s essentially exploiting people’s fear of drugs to win support for his economic approach.
“This fantasy that you could stop fentanyl by attacking the precursors is fraught with danger and it’s how we got into this dead end [with fentanyl analogs],” Tree told Filter. “There are dozens of analogs, some of which are much more dangerous than what’s currently out there. If you play this cat-and-mouse game, you may be launching a substitution war that could produce all kinds of new psychoactive substances.”
If transnational drug trafficking groups are blocked from using one fentanyl precursor chemical, he elaborated, they could simply seek a different chemical pathway, potentially with the help of AI, “so you and up with a different fentanyl analog.”
Fentanyl has been a significant factor in US-China relations in recent years. The first Trump administration sought to pressure Beijing to crack down harder on trafficking of illicitly manufactured fentanyl into the US. In 2019, China agreed to effectively stop fentanyl exports, seen as a major concession to Trump’s demands.
But the US has maintained that Chinese manufacturers continue to produce precursor chemicals, which it says are being shipped to illicit laboratories in Mexico to manufacture fentanyl, which is then brought into the US.
Substantially restricting the China-US drug trade is near-impossible, according to Tree, without a radical overhaul of how everyday products are traded.
US-China relations deteriorated further under the Biden administration in 2022, after then-House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D) visited Taiwan, which Beijing considers a breakaway province of China. In response, the Chinese government suspended communication with Washington on a range of areas including drug enforcement. In September 2023, President Joe Biden designated China a “major drug transit or major illicit drug producing” country, further upsetting President Xi Jinping’s administration.
After both governments made some concessions, cooperation around drug enforcement started up again in January 2024. Law enforcement officials and scientists from the two countries hold regular meetings to share information, and elected officials have met too. Biden agreed to lift sanctions on a Chinese state forensic institute that has been accused of using genetic research to surveil and target ethnic minority groups. Meanwhile, Xi oversaw the arrest of a Chinese suspected trafficking group member with alleged ties to the Sinaloa group in Mexico, and implemented stricter regulation on three fentanyl precursor chemicals.
But substantially restricting the China-US drug trade is near-impossible, according to Tree, without a radical overhaul of how everyday products are traded.
“There’s only so much you can do when you’re dealing with multi-use chemicals,” Tree said. “Stopping exports of products, legal or illegal, from China is really hard to do in an era of globalization. These ports are moving cargo at rapid speeds. The whole point of free trade was to streamline and accelerate the crossing of goods at ports. That meant reducing red tape and less inspections. You get some economic ‘efficiency,’ but in the long run you have less control to police things that go across your border.”
“At some point they’ll decide, let’s just make it in the US, and there’s already been domestic production.”
“They hide these chemicals in these packages, and mix the stuff in with all these consumer products,” he continued. “They go into a shipping container and they are let through customs in large batches. The Mexican cartels have found it’s far easier to import those chemicals directly into the US and then smuggle it south to Mexico to be turned into fentanyl.”
“At some point they’ll decide, let’s just make it in the US, and there’s already been domestic production,” Tree added.
That reflects the reality that even if imports from China were entirely halted, US demand for drugs would still exist and people would just find more ways to meet that lucrative demand. This displacement caused by enforcement has long been known as the “balloon effect.”
As Tree also noted, the US seems set to double down on an approach that incentivizes producers to find new, potentially riskier, substitutes for fentanyl, illustrating what’s known as the Iron Law of Prohibition.
Photograph of Xi and Trump meeting at the 2018 G20 Buenos Aires summit by Dan Scavino Jr. via Wikimedia Commons/Public Domain
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