President Donald Trump says the main reason for his new tariffs on the three biggest trading partners in the United States is what he calls a “national emergency” brought about by fentanyl flowing across the country’s borders.
Trump says he holds Canada, China and Mexico responsible for the spread of smuggling drugs.
“They allowed fentanyl to come to our country at a level they had never seen before,” he mentioned Mexico and Canada in a joint speech to Congress on Tuesday night, referring to “our citizens and many very young, beautiful people destroying their families.”
But tariffs will arise as the fentanyl epidemic shows slight improvements, says drug policy experts and economics researchers.
They fear that 25% tariffs on almost all goods from Mexico and Canada, and 20% of all Chinese imports will erode the international cooperation needed to block global drug trafficking operations.
“Taxes are not the most keen tool in terms of negotiating with other countries and combining them with drug and border policies,” said Bob McNabb, chairman of the Faculty of Economics at Old Dominion University, Virginia. “This is similar to having a fence line dispute with your neighbor and taking a sledge hammer with you.”
After years of increased deaths from overdose, the US recorded 87,000 drug overdose deaths from October 2023 to September 2024. This is down from 114,000 the previous year, according to preliminary data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
This was the lowest overdose death toll in the 12-month period since June 2020, the CDC said. Overdose deaths for the first time in 2021 exceeded 100,000, with the majority being linked to the use of synthetic opioids. The crisis has devastated small communities and urban centres alike.
Vanda Felbab Brown, a researcher of international organized crime as a senior fellow at the Brookings facility, a nonprofit think tank, cited two major factors that suppress the catastrophic effect of fentanyl in the United States.
“These are potentially very fleeting, but they are all pre-custom duties,” she said.
Furthermore, law enforcement continues to confiscate fentanyl at the border. In 2024, approximately 21,900 pounds of drug were seized. This is down from over 27,000 in 2023, but is up from 14,700 in 2022, according to customs and border security.
Almost all of that fentanyl was filmed at the border in the southern United States. In the current fiscal year, just 10 pounds have been recovered along the Canadian border so far, compared to 5,400 along the Mexican border, CBP data shows.
Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau balked at Trump’s tariffs and said Tuesday they “have no justification” because “less than 1% of fentanyl intercepted at the US border came from Canada.”
Last month, after Trump first threatened to impose tariffs, Trudeau announced that he would appoint “Emperor Fentanyl” and designate the cartel as a terrorist organization.
Mexican President Claudia Sinbaum, who took office in October, tried to work with the Trump administration last month by raising thousands of countries’ troops along the border and erasing drugs. Shanebaum is aggressive with Mexican drug cartels and deploys troops in Sinaloa to pursue such crimes.
Sinbaum said Mexico will respond to Trump’s tariffs by Sunday. Canada and China have already announced retaliatory tariffs on certain US goods, and are fearful of a full trade war.
Gladys McCormick, chairman of Mexico-US relations at Syracuse University, said tariffs could cause “irrevocable damage to trust” between the US and Mexico, with the latter leaning heavily towards China, the second largest trading partner.
Federal prosecutors have accused China-based companies of the production and sale of fentanyl precursors used to manufacture drugs, and accusing cartels of distributing them around the world, including Mexico, which creates synthetic opioids.
Mexican leaders may try to negotiate with the Trump administration to prevent the Mexican economy from declining, McCormick said.
“The consequence of pushing the Mexican economy into a forced, deep recession is that people, if any, have to actually resort to informal economic activity.
Fentanyl is a powerful drug used in hospital settings as an anesthetic and painkiller. US drug officials say illegal fentanyl has started to emerge from China about a decade ago and is becoming illegally spread as a result of the opioid epidemic that began with addictive painkillers like OxyContin. Fentanyl is much cheaper to produce, but can be up to 50 times more deadly than heroin, but some versions are less powerful.
McNab said Trump’s new tariffs do not address other ways in which fentanyl enters the United States, including smuggling by Americans. Americans were 80% of all people caught in fentanyl during their border crossing at ports of entry from 2019 to 2024, according to CBP data obtained by the Cato Institute, a libertarian think tank.
“If tariffs can stop imports of fentanyl and stop individuals from illegally crossing their borders to the US, they will agree that it is a commendable goal,” McNabb said. “But at the end of the day, I don’t know if this all costs hundreds of billions of dollars of economic activity.
Some states have seen the trend change over the last few months due to the fentanyl crisis.
Dennis Cocon, founder and president of HarmReduction Ohio, who supports progressive drug policy, said he has witnessed a dramatic decline in the state’s fentanyl-related overdose deaths over the past two years. State officials say Ohio has outperformed the national decline by expanding its distribution and treatment services of naloxone.
Cauchon also attributed to the 2023 farewell of the Sinaloa Cartel’s top leadership, once led by Kingpin Joaquin “El Chapo” Guzman Loera, which disrupts the fentanyl market.
“While tariffs may gain credibility in the future, the reality is that fentanyl has been declining at a historic level for two years,” Cauchon said. “It’s hard to guess whether that will last.”
