The executive order President Donald Trump signed Monday designating fentanyl and the opioid’s precursor chemicals as weapons of mass destruction has “zero legal impact,” said CNN senior legal analyst Elie Honig during a “NewsNight” appearance later that evening.
“It is completely meaningless,” said Honig. “It’s symbolic. Federal law describes what a weapon of mass destruction is. Generally, it has to be an incendiary device, something that blows up, something that shoots, something that disseminates poison, that kind of thing.”
He added, “If you commit a crime involving a weapon of mass destruction, it’s very serious. Penalties involved could be life in prison, could be death if someone dies. But the president saying drugs or fentanyl are now weapons of mass destruction has zero, zero legal impact.”
The U.S. has launched deadly military strikes against alleged drug smugglers in Caribbean and Pacific waters since September, with Trump maintaining that these potentially extrajudicial killings aim almost exclusively to curb the flow of narcotics into the country.
Honig argued Trump has no authority to designate drugs as weapons, let alone WMDs.
“It’s up to the judges,” he said Monday. “It’s up to the parties on a case-by-case basis. It’s an interesting argument. It doesn’t meet the definition. But it’s like, if the president declared that a slingshot is a firearm, it doesn’t make it a firearm, for legal purposes.”
Guest host Sara Sidner noted that the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention counted more than 80,000 overdose deaths across the U.S. in 2024 alone, and that fentanyl plays a central role in the ongoing opioid crisis and its annual fatalities.
“And it is a killer, a lethal killer like we’ve never seen,” Honig acknowledged. “And I approve of and applaud the administration for being ultra-aggressive in going after it. But that doesn’t mean you get to blow up everything you want, anywhere you want.”
The Trump administration has killed at least 90 people with their strikes on alleged drug boats, killing shipwrecked survivors during a Sept. 2 operation near Venezuela that left even some Republicans concerned that the incident could constitute a war crime.
While pro-Trump pundit Scott Jennings on Monday asked why the U.S. can’t just “blow up terrorists” who are carrying “industrial-grade chemical weapons,” his fellow panelists countered that the public hasn’t been shown any evidence that this is even the case.
“They’re not coming on those boats, Scott,” said political commentator Ana Navarro.
Navarro, Honig and former Rep. Bakari Sellers (D-S.C.) explained that the overwhelming majority of fentanyl in the U.S. comes from Mexico and China. Trump has nonetheless threatened to send U.S. troops to Venezuela to crack down on its supposed operations.
His administration recently seized a Venezuelan oil tanker and confirmed that more such ships will be seized in the future. Asked last week if U.S. tensions with Venezuela are thus “still just about drugs” or now “also about oil,” Trump said, “Well, it’s about a lot of things.”
Former President George W. Bush and his administration notably warned in 2002 that there were nuclear weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, home of the world’s fifth-largest proven crude oil reserves — but found none during the 2003 invasion and yearslong occupation. Venezuela holds the world’s largest proven oil reserves at around 300 billion barrels, prompting some to speculate that that is the president’s real target.