There is no doubt that, in the wrong circumstances, fentanyl can be an agent of mass destruction. In the last decade, the ultra-potent synthetic opioid has caused hundreds of thousands of Americans to die by overdose, shattering families, shortening life expectancy, and destabilizing the economy in the process.

But is fentanyl a weapon of mass destruction?

According to President Trump, yes. On Monday, the president issued an executive order that claimed fentanyl is “closer to a chemical weapon than a narcotic” and that it could potentially be weaponized for “concentrated, large-scale terror attacks by organized adversaries.”

But those claims lack evidence, according to drug policy experts, who in interviews with STAT cast Trump’s action as more about optics than action.

“Neither terrorist organizations nor militaries are using fentanyl as a weapon,” said Jonathan Caulkins, a professor at Carnegie Mellon University whose research focuses on drugs, crime, terror, and violence. “It is not obvious to me that this is a threat.”

The executive order comes as Trump has used escalating and increasingly militaristic tactics to combat drug smuggling, engaging in questionably legal strikes on boats near Venezuela — which law enforcement and military experts have said were trafficking cocaine to Europe, not fentanyl to North America.

The Trump administration has previously used bombastic language regarding the drug crisis, arguing that drug dealers should receive the death penalty. Earlier this year, Attorney General Pam Bondi drew scorn for claiming not just that federal drug interdiction had captured millions of potentially deadly fentanyl doses, but that the Trump administration’s specific efforts had saved the lives of 258 million Americans — three-quarters of the population.

Declaring fentanyl a weapon of mass destruction, however, constitutes a new front in Trump’s rhetorical war, and plays into the fear and anguish experienced by the millions of American families hurt by addiction.

“You think about all of the people who’ve lost loved ones, and they want a president who’s going to hold drug cartels accountable,” said Regina LaBelle, a former top White House drug policy adviser during the Obama and Biden administrations. But Trump’s new declaration, she said, “is about looking like you’re doing something rather than actually doing something.”

While fentanyl’s potency and potential to cause deadly harm is beyond dispute, it has not been weaponized by a military, police force, or terrorist group at any point in the last decade.

In fact, there is only one documented instance of fentanyl being used as a bioweapon: a 2002 hostage crisis in Moscow during which Russian security services released gas believed to contain an aerosolized fentanyl analogue into a theater. While the gas succeeded in killing the 40 captors, it also contributed to the deaths of as many as 132 hostages.

In the years since, fentanyl has not gained prominence as a bioweapon even as it has replaced prescription painkillers and heroin as the dominant U.S. street drug.

In the U.S., drug deaths have declined steadily since 2023, but still remain at epidemic levels, with roughly 76,000 Americans estimated to have died of an overdose in the 12-month span ending in April.

But the Trump administration has done little on the issue beyond issuing a hardline executive order on homelessness and threatening to withhold funding from certain harm reduction organizations.

In the meantime, it has cut staff and resources from key federal agencies overseeing drug policy, addiction treatment, and research. Currently, the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration and the Office of National Drug Control Policy lack permanent leadership.

What’s more, LaBelle said, many law enforcement agents focused on stopping drug trafficking, including some from the Drug Enforcement Administration, have been reassigned from their typical jobs to assist in immigration raids or patrol U.S. cities.

Trump is not the first to suggest that fentanyl should be considered a weapon of mass destruction: Lauren Boebert, a Republican congresswoman from Colorado, has previously introduced similar legislation, and was joined at one point by Tim Ryan, an Ohio Democrat who ran unsuccessfully for Senate in 2022.

The designation’s appeal is apparent, said Caulkins, the Carnegie Mellon professor, especially considering that even tiny quantities of fentanyl could cause overdose in people who don’t already use opioids.

But simply applying the label regardless of the true threat level posed cheapens the term itself, he argued.

“I personally would prefer not to call every single thing that kills a large number of people a weapon of mass destruction,” he said.

He added: “I’m inclined to push back against the hijacking of terms that have a specific meaning just to harness the emotional impact. By those arguments, cigarettes would be weapons of mass destruction — cigarettes kill more Americans every year than fentanyl does.”

Separately, Trump on Monday indicated to reporters that he was considering, and perhaps favored, the reclassification of marijuana to a lower tier on the federal Schedule of Controlled Substances.

“A lot of people want to see it, the reclassification, because it leads to tremendous amounts of research that can’t be done unless you reclassify, so we are looking at that very strongly,” he said.

The marijuana rescheduling process, long sought by pro-cannabis activists and left unfinished by the Biden administration, has remained in limbo since Trump took office in January. Experts, however, say the true impact of making marijuana a Schedule III substance is overstated, and would be felt most acutely by businesses saving money on federal taxes.

Marijuana policy is in a holding period more broadly, following last month’s closure of the “cannabis loophole,” essentially starting a one-year clock after which many cannabis businesses operating in a legally gray space could be effectively forced to shut down unless Congress acts.

STAT’s coverage of chronic health issues is supported by a grant from Bloomberg Philanthropies. Our financial supporters are not involved in any decisions about our journalism.