US President Donald Trump said on Wednesday that Beijing is “making big steps” in efforts to control the flow of fentanyl, an issue that the American leader has used to justify tariffs that he has slapped on imports from China.
“I think China has been helping out,” Trump told reporters in the Oval Office. “I mean, it’s been a terrible situation for many years with fentanyl, but since I came here, we’re talking to them, and they’re making big steps ... You know that they’re being penalised with tariffs because of the fentanyl but they want to do something.”
Trump’s positive assessment differs sharply the strident tone that he used when announcing in February that the US would not only impose his originally outlined 10 per cent tariffs on all Chinese imports beginning on Tuesday, but that these were now being doubled for an effective rate of 20 per cent.
The comment also comes amid high-level negotiations between his team and Chinese counterparts to broker a climbdown on overlapping tariffs and other trade restrictions that the two sides have directed at each other.
“A large percentage of these Drugs, much of them in the form of Fentanyl, are made in, and supplied by, China,” Trump declared on his Truth Social account in February. “Until it stops, or is seriously limited, the proposed TARIFFS scheduled to go into effect on MARCH FOURTH will, indeed, go into effect, as scheduled.”
Trump made the comments ahead of his official signing of a bill – Halt All Lethal Trafficking of Fentanyl Act or the HALT Fentanyl Act – that permanently places fentanyl-related substances into Schedule I of the Controlled Substances Act into law.
A schedule I controlled substance refers to “a drug, substance, or chemical that has a high potential for abuse; has no currently accepted medical value; and is subject to regulatory controls and administrative, civil, and criminal penalties under the Controlled Substances Act”. Those penalties include a 10-year mandatory minimum prison term.
That move came weeks before the president announced additional levies – so-called reciprocal tariffs – of 125 per cent on imports from the country, which US Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent and other members of Trump’s economic team are in talks with their Chinese counterparts to avert before a temporary pause on them expires on August 12.
Trump’s declaration in February also involved tariffs of 25 per cent on all imports from Mexico and Canada, which he said were not doing enough to stop trafficking across their borders with the US.
“China delivers much of the fentanyl; some people would say all of it,” Trump said later on Wednesday, when his signed the HALT Act.
“They deliver it into Mexico and even into our own country. We have a 20 per cent [tariff], so they pay billions of dollars and billions of dollars in damages for what they’ve done, and I think we’re going to work it out so that China is going to end up going from that to giving the death penalty to the people that create this.”
Fentanyl-related deaths in the US rose steadily for years, from an estimated 29,725 in 2018 to a high of 76,282 in 2023. Until the US Centres for Disease Control and Prevention did not publish exact figures for fentanyl alone, instead tracking death rates involving “synthetic opioids other than methadone”.
But the sharp upwards trend has begun to ease. According to estimates by the agency, overdose deaths linked to fentanyl dropped to 48,422 in 2024.
-- SOUTH CHINA MORNING POST
