Trump Just Won a Major Drug War Victory. Why Isn't He Bragging?
No one is reporting this, not even Truth Social
The last time I wrote about Trump, I predicted he would take credit for falling overdose death rates. He promptly did, and his press secretary got pissed when the Washington Post didn’t do the same.
That was three months and ten thousand news cycles ago. Elon. Public land sell-offs. Transgender softball pitcher. Iran.
But almost completely absent from the news has been the most significant foreign policy success of his new term. This achievement has been lost on nearly everyone — perhaps even on Trump himself, who somehow has not been bragging about it on Truth Social.
It involves a class of synthetic opioids called nitazenes. Though originally developed as pharmaceutical pain relievers, nitazenes have migrated almost entirely to the recreational realm, killing thousands of Americans in recent years.
Some nitazenes are even more potent than fentanyl, and though their misuse hasn’t yet reached epidemic levels, they have received tons of coverage, with headlines like:
“DEA reports alarming rise in nitazenes and overdose deaths”
“‘There has never been a more dangerous time to take drugs’”
Nitazenes, like most synthetic drugs of abuse, are primarily manufactured in Chinese labs. And though nitazenes are illegal in the U.S., in China most of them are entirely legal.
But that’s about to end because, on July 1, China will schedule the entire class of nitazenes. In what is known as a “blanket ban,” any type of nitazene that has been invented — and any that will be invented in the future — will be automatically controlled.
This is a big deal, because…