Designating fentanyl as a WMD gives DEA 'more tools' to fight it, administrator says
Trump signed an executive order this week to change the designation.
When President Donald Trump designated fentanyl as a "Weapon of Mass Destruction," it gave the Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) more tools to combat the drug in the U.S., according to the man who is leading the agency.
"The designation is giving us more tools," Terry Cole, the administrator of the DEA, told ABC News. "It's opening up the aperture to treat this really, you know, continuous poison that's coming to the United States as a weapon of mass destruction."
The executive order signed by the president this week gives "instruction to the Attorney General, to the State Department, to the Department of War, to all work together to combat this poison that is coming to our country," Cole said.
Mexican drug cartels, he said, "never sleep," and defending people from fentanyl is a matter of national security.
"Right now, they are plotting, they are manufacturing, they are getting ready to distribute and transport thousands of pounds of methamphetamine, of cocaine, of fentanyl, to the United States to poison our citizens," he said.
The executive order signed by the president allows for more resources to be thrown at countering the flow of fentanyl.
Cole calls the Mexican drug cartels "designated terrorists," echoing the administration's phrasing about the cartels.
"When we talk about the epidemic that they have caused in this country, the loss of lives, it is unparamount, the amount of destruction that they have caused in this country, and we are going to treat them exactly like they are designated terrorists. They're killing our citizens," he said.
Cole, who was interviewed on Wednesday, was also asked about the Trump administration's policy on rescheduling of marijuana, but he said he couldn't comment on it because the agency is still in the "deliberation process."
The following day, Trump signed an executive order reclassifying marijuana from a Schedule I drug, the most restrictive federal category that includes heroin and LSD, to a Schedule III drug, putting it in the same group as common prescription painkillers such as Tylenol with codeine.