Is Donald Trump’s Trade War Really A War On Drugs?

(Bloomberg Opinion) -- In Manhattan’s Chinatown, where the Bowery meets East Broadway and Mott Street, there are two statues of historic Chinese personages. They’re one block apart, but separated by close to 2,400 years. Confucius, who lived in the 6th century BC, is the more famous of the two, but just to his south on Chatham Square is Lin Zexu, who died just 175 years ago. On Lin’s pedestal are the words “pioneer in the war against drugs” in both English and Chinese. That makes him more relevant than Confucius in the America of Donald Trump.In 1839, Lin was the Qing dynasty official who confronted the British and their illegal opium trade that pushed the substance on Chinese users; he confiscated 20,000 chests of the drug and cast the shipments into the sea. In 21st century money, that single cache would approach half a billion dollars. A war against drugs — specifically the synthetic opioid fentanyl — ostensibly underlies Trump’s on-then-off tariffs against Canada and Mexico, on one hand, and the 10% duties newly imposed on China, on the other.Trump’s anti-drug gambit isn’t about throwing fentanyl into the ocean. It involves the de minimis exemption from customs duties for mail declared to be worth less than $800. De minimis is Latin and in contemporary legal parlance indicates something that is too small to be meaningful. That’s too big a loophole, according to the US Drug Enforcement Agency. A single kilogram of fentanyl can potentially produce half-a-million tablets containing 2 mg of the substance each. That amount can be lethal. But illegal pressing of the drug can sometimes produce pills with more than 8 mg each. Fentanyl is most often mixed into other illegal drugs to increase their potency. In 2023, there were an estimated 75,000 American fatalities due to synthetic opioid overdoses..US-China Trade War: Indian Exporters Expect Scenario Akin To Trump 1.0.The US president’s executive order ends the de minimis exemption of deliveries from China in an effort to close off that entry point for illegal opioids. It would also, however, severely affect the already compromised commerce between the countries. The People’s Republic accounts for about two-thirds of the estimated 1 billion annual de minimis shipments to the U.S. Indeed, Americans took in $228.3 billion worth of such deliveries from China between 2018 and 2021. Its main beneficiaries were online shopping superstars Temu and Shein, which have profited from American online bargain hunters. China’s cross-border ecommerce grew by more than 40% last year, reaching nearly $94 billion. Temu and Shein will likely feel the immediate brunt of Trump’s additional 10% tariffs Will Trump’s stratagem stem the flow of the deadly drug? First, think of the customs and postal agents faced with assessing duties on an additional 600,000-plus pieces of mail a year. Second, while the drug and its precursor chemicals may come from China (and increasingly, India), criminal networks based in Mexico have been the main source of the illegal fentanyl getting into the US. To avert tariffs on her country, Mexican President Claudia Sheinbaum promised to deploy 10,000 more soldiers on the nearly 2,000-mile border with the US to interdict the drug as well as people. That’s likely to put a crimp on all sorts of legal commerce as well.The third likelihood is that China’s e-commerce enterprises will find workarounds to sell their toys, household wares, clothing and gadgets to American consumers, who will continue to pay for the cheaper goods because of the convenience of ordering them. The trade part of the war on fentanyl is just going to make things dearer. Meanwhile, Americans’ fentanyl use won’t diminish significantly. That will only happen if the US addresses demand as well as supply. So far, the heated focus on tariffs and one-upmanship on trade obscure the real suffering of ordinary Americans. The war on drugs has been invoked so many times — as early as the scandal-plagued Nixon presidency — that it is too often perceived as a smokescreen for other problems.Let’s get back to Lin Zexu. Today, he’s regarded as a hero by ethnic Chinese all over the world. But his actions prompted the Opium Wars that humiliated the Chinese empire and eventually led to its downfall. The Western powers forced China to legalize opium use. There is one high but not improbable estimate that half the empire’s population — or 200 million people — tried opium at one time or another (the majority were not addicts, of course, because then as now, opioids — including fentanyl — have genuinely medicinal and therapeutic uses). China struggled with opium for more than a century and only truly suppressed addiction after Mao Zedong and the Communist Party took over the mainland in 1949. While China imposed the death penalty on drug traffickers, it also spent decades treating its addicted populations, providing economic opportunities that obviated the appeal of opium. There were no easy fixes and China had a narcotic problem into the 1970s.In his recent book Smoke and Ashes: Opium’s Hidden Histories, Amitav Ghosh recounts that China didn’t free itself from opium on its own. Transnational cooperation made it happen. In 1907, Britain — masters of the poppy fields in India that were the main source of China’s opium imports — finally chose to collaborate. For decades, British merchants had argued that opium use was China’s choice; furthermore, free trade meant Britain was only responding to Chinese demand. As the post-colonial era took hold, independent India continued to cull opium as China eradicated its own poppy production (which had grown to compete with the British imports). In the meantime, Beijing began a propaganda drive that targeted opium’s role in China’s humiliation at the hands of the West and made the drug socially and politically unpalatable. Many now look at the opium eaters of the West with pity — and a sense of comeuppance. Ghosh points out that descriptions of opioid-devastated Appalachia today are terrifyingly reminiscent of impoverished Chinese villages sapped by opium in the 19th century. Both the US and China have been scourged by the same substance. There must be something to be built out of that sympathy to help America out of its crisis — and avoid anything with the word war attached to it..Trump Administration Seeks To Cut Off Iran’s Oil Exports

Is Donald Trump’s Trade War Really A War On Drugs?

The US may find lessons in how China dealt with its century-long opium scourge.

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