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Dec. 16, 2025 - Ron Paul Liberty Report
30:35
From Drugs to War Trump Labels Fentanyl a ‘WMD’

President Trump has signed an executive order declaring the synthetic opioid fentanyl to be a "weapon of mass destruction," falsely claiming that it kills 200-300,000 Americans per year. We are back in 2002 Iraq War territory, with made up statistics and fear porn being used to grease the path to war.

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Time Text
Fentanyl, Mass Destruction, and Liberty Loss 00:15:07
Hello, everybody, and thank you for tuning in to the Liberty Report.
With us today, we have Daniel McAdams.
Daniel, good to see you today.
Good morning, Dr. Paul.
How are you?
Doing fine.
Doing fine.
The world needs all this help it can get.
I want to start off.
There's several things we want to do, but it seems like there's a world event of deterioration of any common sense or a lack of even a faint understanding about what personal liberty ought to be about and personal courtesies and protection of civil liberties.
So there's lots of things to talk about there.
And it's not just one country that's doing this.
It seems like it's very contagious.
And we'll try to deal with that and give us our two cents worth.
Yes.
Hope it's worth more than two cents.
That's the old two cents.
Yeah.
Anyway, I want to start off with something I spotted this morning.
Wow, this sounds like craziness.
It says, President Trump signs an executive order.
Well, I could stop there, I guess, signs an executive order declaring fentanyl a, quote, weapon of mass destruction.
I wonder what he has up his sleeve, because he's been making a lot of declarations to justify a foreign policy that's different than how he outlined in his campaign, which is a bother to us and to others, too.
And yet it also excites people to use this as a test of loyalty.
So if he's saying something that isn't quite usual to turn against it or point this out, boy, you can get into trouble with the people who are dedicated.
We think we should be dedicated to people.
We did the best we could when we were hearing the outline about foreign policy during the campaign.
We were hopeful, but we've been hopeful before, presidential campaigns.
You could go all the way back to FDR.
In 1932, he had a pretty good speech at a position there that he did not believe in.
But anyway, this weapons of mass destruction, what can they do?
It looks like it can open up the door to this.
We've talked about fentanyl, and it just seems like they're missing it completely.
If they can get everybody concentrating on fentanyl and not a non-interventionist foreign policy, all this is looking, they're providing another noisy way of interfering overseas and intervening overseas.
And I think from that viewpoint, I'd say they're going in the opposite direction if we're looking for peace and prosperity.
Yeah, let's put this first one up.
Now, this is a write-up at anti-war.com.
As usual, they have a very succinct way of doing it.
President Trump signs executive order declaring fentanyl a weapon of mass destruction.
As you just said, Dr. Paul, President Trump on Monday declared that the synthetic opioid fentanyl is a weapon of mass destruction, signaling he may use the drug as a pretext for a war in Latin America.
Illicit fentanyl is closure to chemical weapons that are narcotic, the executive order says, et cetera, et cetera.
What this looks to me like, Dr. Paul, is pretty transparent.
All of the polls, and we've cited them, show an overwhelming opposition among the American people to a war on Venezuela.
Nobody wants it.
Republicans don't want it, partially because they know it's going to kill them in the midterms.
Democrats don't want it.
They probably secretly do want it because, no, it's going to kill the Republicans in the midterms.
But nobody wants this war.
The American people are, I think, 70% opposed to this.
So what do you do?
You pull an Iraq war out of your hat, Iraq war rabbit out of your hat, and say, no, this is about WMDs, not remembering perhaps that the old WMDs were a lie.
And so people might draw that conclusion.
But here's actually, if you grab that earpiece, I have a we have the video of Trump and his explanation for why he's doing this.
If we can play that first video, if we have that handy and play that first video of Trump, here we go.
Let's listen to Trump here.
Deadly fentanyl into our country.
With this historic executive order, I will sign today.
We're formally classifying fentanyl as a weapon of mass destruction, which is what it is.
No bomb does what this is doing.
200 to 300,000 people die every year that we know of.
So we're formally classifying fentanyl as a weapon of mass destruction.
But before I sign the 200 to 300,000 people that we know of die from fentanyl every year.
But that's just not true.
Go to the next clip.
This is from Statista.
These are this tracks, fentanyl.
Indeed, over the past few years, there has been a serious increase in use or in overdoses.
There is no doubt about it.
But nevertheless, as of 2023, it's actually tapering off.
I've seen 24 statistics that are even lower, and that number is about 73,418, if I'm seeing the board correctly, that died from it in 2023.
That number is lower this year.
It's decreasingly used.
So it's just absolutely not true, Dr. Paul, about it.
And as you point out, very, very often, you can almost double that for alcohol-related deaths every year.
But here's something that I just wanted to put up as sort of a joke in a way, because it's so preposterous.
It's just like declaring someone on a boat you don't like, a terrorist, a narco-terrorist, declaring a drug you don't like, a WMD.
Now, put on this next post on X.
This is Martha Buena.
You remember Martha?
We met her in Nevada at a crypto conference.
Super nice, super smart lady.
She gave up her seat for us, if you remember that.
Anyway, she has a great take on this.
She says, Dear White House, I'd like to inform the president that these companies produce fentanyl, aka weapons of mass destruction, and now therefore should be classified as terrorists under President Trump's new EO: Jansen Pharmaceuticals, Johnson Johnson, Pfizer, Tiva Pharmaceuticals, Malancroft Pharmaceuticals, Space GX, Malancrove subsidiary, and Cambrex.
Thank you for your time and attention to this matter.
And she's being sarcastic in saying that, yes, fentanyl is being produced by all these pharmaceutical companies.
But it doesn't make any sense.
Let's say he wants to use this as the excuse to expand the war in Central America.
Why would he pick a country that doesn't make fentanyl?
And they're not the drug dealer.
Another lie, yeah.
Well, why wouldn't they go into Columbia or some other place?
But it makes no sense whatsoever.
But, you know, I've compared it to alcohol and the danger of alcohol.
And they don't, they obviously can't try to treat the same way.
But what if you compared those numbers to our bombs?
Yeah.
And somebody, just the recent bombs, you know, they're occurring routinely, you know, in the Caribbean.
And but what about over the last 20 years?
Yeah.
How many people died from that that had no threat whatsoever to our national security?
As a matter of fact, it probably made our security less safe.
Maybe a million in Iraq alone, I think, died because of the bombs.
So, yeah, there is something there.
But it's this whole thing of Trump absolutely not just stretching the truth, just flat out lying about it.
And he gets away with it.
Apparently, no one calls him on it, but it's just not the case.
It doesn't mean his fentanyl is great.
We should all go grab some.
Although it is used in the hospital, right?
You're the physician in the house.
It's widely used as a pharmaceutical, right?
You know, I've had to have a couple general anesthetics for repair work.
Who knows?
I might have been even given, I didn't even ask anesthesiologists, or are you using fentanyl?
But I recall them talking about it, and there were some advantages.
Like I think they had alternatives or the cancellation of the effects of this, but it was strictly medical talk.
Like you say, here it is.
But how many substances are safe if you use them right?
They shouldn't be off the market.
And yet they turn it into a monster.
You know, in a way, alcohol is like that.
I'm sure there's a lot of people who used alcohol in a medicinal purpose and probably wasn't doing any real harm.
But it's also the potential is there.
It's back to the question, even if some of this had a half-truth, who said the government should be in charge of making us safe on everything we do, everything we put in our mouth, everything at all.
All we have to do, since they've given up on this, that we're responsible for our own safety, what they're doing, they find something like I said, you're unsafe, you're unsafe.
Even if Venezuela doesn't manufacture, you're unsafe, you're unsafe.
So therefore, you drop everything and you rush down there and send more bombs down there and see what kind of mischief you can get into.
And I think the big important point that we've seen in the chart is that the use is tapering off as people come to understand that this is some bad stuff.
It reminds me of the crack cocaine epidemic of, I don't know if it was the 80s or 90s or whatever.
Remember, it was terrible and everyone was using it.
Then they realized how terrible it was and it's tapered off.
People don't use it as much.
But of course, they never want to look at the cause.
Why do so many people just want to get high?
What is wrong in our society?
You probably would talk about a moral bankruptcy, a moral failure.
You could also talk about affordability, as you did in your column this week, the fact that young people can't afford to buy whatever it is.
There's a despair, I think, that leads people to do this.
Nobody wants to address that.
They just want to drop bombs.
And when they make the mistake, not only are they universal for a state or a country, it's sort of a world event because it is the motivator because all they have to do is tag them with a label and they're a terrorist.
And, well, that's it.
Look how well they used that back 20 years ago in Iraq.
A terrorist, a terrorist, therefore give up everything possible.
And then find out that most of the stuff were based on laws.
Now, I don't know how people that disagree with us can constantly say that we're off base.
There have been some converts, but not very many.
It's sort of like converting people from fiat money to gold money.
Have to see some big problems first to say, well, I guess maybe there is something wrong with the system.
And there certainly is something wrong with the system that allows an executive order to do this.
And the thing is, criticizing this obvious run-up to war, it does remind me of the time in the 2000s because you were criticized at the time.
Why do you just hate President Bush?
You're a bad Republican.
Well, the people who stood by him blindly didn't do him any favors when he went about doing this.
He needs people around him to correct him for making dumb moves, which is what he's doing.
So, pardon me.
So, the other related thing, though, this is what the fentanyl is all about, the WMDs are all about.
And that is the next clip, which is the House will vote this week to block Trump from launching a war with Venezuela.
Now, we've covered this last time that it was introduced.
This is something that people who followed your career in the House are familiar with during the Iraq War, which is one of the only good things about the War Powers Resolution or Act is that it provided a means by which members of the House can bring a privilege resolution to the floor and force a vote.
It can't be ignored by the Speaker of the House.
And so, Thomas Massey, McGovern from Massachusetts, and a few others have introduced H. Conres 64, which will have a vote on Thursday, reminding the president that he cannot launch an attack on Venezuela without Congress being involved.
Now, that's not a binding resolution, Dr. Paul, but as you remember from your efforts with Mr. Kucinich and others, it lays the groundwork.
It puts up the signpost, we don't approve, put on the brakes.
It's a symbolic gesture, I think, but an important one.
Can you imagine what type of name-calling will be elicited from this if the anti-war people win this vote?
There's going to be a lot of hate and a lot of expressions of people being out of line, even party.
This is one thing it'll be bipartisan.
You know, the administration can be pretty tough on their own people.
So, that's the part that I can't understand.
How can we be so different that the people we see as the best in Congress, closest to a principled stand, defending the Constitution and non-interventionism, and be so close to it and be the ones that are being attacked the most?
That doesn't make any sense, you know, from a party member.
You know, I disagreed with a lot of what the Republicans did, but I never got to the point where I got engaged in this.
Besides, nobody would have cared anyway.
Well, here's a good reason for this to pass.
And obviously, we don't do it very often, but people should contact the representatives, encourage them to support this, whether you like or dislike Trump.
If you like Trump, save him from doing a dumb thing, save his legacy, because this will be a disaster.
Stopping Criticism of Faraway Countries 00:11:19
But go to that third video clip.
We don't need to put in our earpiece on this one because this just happened yesterday.
This is why Congress does need to speak up about what's going on.
This is the third one, I think, is the boat, if that's correct.
Yes, yeah.
Go ahead and fill this up.
Southern Command, this is what they did yesterday, Dr. Paul.
Some guys were in the water off Venezuela.
Kaboom, look at that fireball.
Incinerated.
These people were incinerated.
They weren't charged with the crime.
They weren't proven to have narcotics.
Nobody knows what was going on in this boat, and they were incinerated.
This makes, I don't know how many people killed, extrajudicial killings.
It's a war crime, Dr. Paul, and we know that it is.
You can take it off now, actually.
We know that it is.
But this is supposed to get people to respect us and move toward a more peaceful relationship.
But can you imagine, you know, people looking at this?
I don't think we're going to gain that much.
Miles, you know, sometimes the people in this country will wake up and say, how far away is Syria?
How far away is Pakistan and Afghanistan?
Thousands of miles away.
And where they're selling this to the American people.
And then the American people, they don't see the connection that that is connected to their biggest worry, and that is grocery prices are going up.
And their personal liberties at home are being attacked.
And yet they will swallow this.
And it's mainly because they feel helpless in taking on the whole media system because, you know, the media doesn't help us out very often.
And they say, I'm thankful for the internet that we can get a message out.
And it is possible.
It's far from perfect.
But I think it's certainly a way that some of the message of liberty does get out.
So we should look at the positive as well.
Yeah, that's true.
Even though the algorithms can mess us up, we're going to talk about that in our next one.
Now, here's something that everyone has been talking.
A lot of people that I know have been talking about.
I think it's very important.
You remember the National Security Strategy came out and it talked about Europe losing its values.
Vice President JD Vance gave a great talk over the summer where he talked about Europe is attacks on free speech, losing the value of promoting free speech and democracy.
I think Vice President Vance did a very good job.
Well, Europe is not listening.
Here's what they did yesterday, if you can put that up.
EU sanctions Swiss intelligence expert, intelligence expert Jacques Bode.
If anyone is following what's happening in Russia, listens to people, I'm sure you will listen to people like Colonel McGregor and Judge Napolitano and Larry Johnson.
All of them are good friends.
But you're also going to be coming across Jacques Bode, who is a former Swiss colonel in the Swiss military, but an expert in intelligence affairs and an important analyst and also the author of, I think, at least five or six books on intelligence, war, and terrorism.
So he is a bona fide intellectual, Dr. Paul.
He's not some guy screaming on the street corner.
Nevertheless, Europe has sanctioned him.
If you go to the next one, he says he's not writing fantasies.
There are footnotes on virtually every page of his books, links to the sources.
But this didn't sit.
This is from Moon of Alabama, by the way.
This, of course, doesn't sit well with EU officialdom that is living in a fantasy world where Russia is so weak that its economy will crash.
The next month, so strong that it will conquer Europe by next summer.
And that is the point.
So it's not just the sanctions.
It's not just them wagging their tongues at Jacques Bode.
It's them saying you cannot get a visa to travel to any European country.
And I'm not sure what else, what other kind of restrictions there are, but it sends a very chilling signal that someone in Europe who says what you've been saying a long time that, hey, we've got to look at 2014.
Things aren't as they are in the mainstream media.
There's more to the story than meets the eye.
Someone saying what you would say happens to be in Switzerland.
The Europeans are attacking him for saying it.
You know, I think this is corrected.
This article that he's listed as being 70 years old.
So can you imagine building a reputation over those many years?
Because you use the word intellectual, which means that he's going to be a journalist or teacher or whatever.
And all of a sudden, he comes crashing down.
So he has to have mixed feelings.
Sometimes, though, this brings out even a stronger position.
And hopefully, I think there's a request that more people should look at this because I was not aware of these details that these things should be mentioned because people should realize what's going on.
And, of course, we should be concerned about this and what's happening because although this is not in the United States, we're in charge of a big empire.
And we're also victims of this type of an attitude when it comes here.
And it is already here to some degree.
Well, that's a great point.
Saying something the government likes and they can ruin your life.
And that's a great segue because it is happening here, in fact.
And there are a couple of things that really were getting a lot of attention on X yesterday.
And I have a couple of clips.
The first one is Trump's nominee to be anti-Semitism czar.
And here's something he said that caught a lot of people's attention.
If you can do that second to last video clip and listen to what he had to say, it is chilling and it does remind us that they are declaring war on speech they don't like.
Let's listen to him.
A minute, 20 years.
The president is sending a very strong message.
Think about it.
Ironically, I get off a plane.
I am the president's representative, and I am walking off with a Yamulka.
And I have kosher food, and embassies will have kosher food.
It is a game changer.
The appointment is a game changer.
And it's not about history.
It's about education.
And how do we educate?
Indonesia has 350 million Muslims living in the country.
How do we change their textbooks?
How do we hold the people in Gaza accountable?
That if America is paying for UN textbooks and supposedly the changes are made, why are those textbooks not being used and why are they using their old textbooks?
We have to teach people it's not okay to educate your kids to be a martyr.
Okay?
And we have to hold those countries accountable.
How do we battle anti-Semitism on the internet?
How are we doing better on algorithms?
What companies can we work with?
We are going to have a whole division within the office of the Special Envoy to Combat Anti-Semitism that is going to work on technology and working with the greatest leaders in technology, many of whom are Jewish and have offered their assistance.
The office is going to be revamped entirely to be one of the highest profile offices in the State Department.
Okay.
So a couple of things.
I think we can all agree that anti-Semitism is distasteful.
It's awful.
It shouldn't be tolerated by people.
People should combat bad ideas with good ideas and good talk.
But what he's talking about is something different.
How can we force the Indonesians to adopt different kinds of textbooks?
How can we force Gaza to adopt the kind of textbooks we want them to have?
And the success in forcing internet companies to shift their algorithms so that if you express views that this gentleman doesn't like, you can't be seen.
You're disappeared.
Well, I thought that's what we were talking about in the Biden administration when they did the exact same thing to people who were challenging some of the COVID things.
Now, some of them were wrong.
Some of them were goofy.
Nevertheless, they were being disappeared.
This is exactly what Trump's anti-Semitisms are is celebrating.
It's a good thing to make people disappear for expressing views you don't like.
You know, they forget one favorite word that I like to use and a lot of other people used it.
And that is problems like this that are difficult and you have different religions and geographies and personal beliefs.
And that is voluntarism.
It solves so much of the problems.
If you just say, no two people can do anything together unless both sides, it does it voluntarily.
If the other side doesn't want to do it, you know, you can't force people to buy stuff, but once the government gets involved in all the regulations, there's a lot of force involved.
What if they get involved in one half of every transaction that is destroy the money?
Nobody thinks of that.
That's one half of it.
They're using these tools, but when it becomes awkward and hard to understand, it's easy to remember.
It's voluntarism.
You know, most Americans, I think, understand this if you can simplify it for them.
If you live in a neighborhood and you want to go into your neighbor's house, they know this, especially in Texas.
They know you can't just barge in.
No, you shouldn't.
And yet we have these big, big problems.
And we think that we can make force people like it's resentful for us to travel thousands of miles away and not be respectful to other people's beliefs if they and then if they could only be encouraged and understand why both sides have to be nonviolent.
But unfortunately, human nature has created a lot of people that don't want to even hear that and they don't enforce it.
And they say, well, if you don't stand up for your beliefs and fight to the bitter end, then you're a bad person.
And they think they're doing good by becoming vicious and trying to impose ourselves on other people.
Well, the thing is, X is a relatively free speech platform, and there's definitely anti-Semitism on X. There's no question about it.
But the average X user doesn't have to see it at all.
If you see an account that's saying things you don't like, you can block that person.
You'll never see another post again.
So what this gentleman is talking about is not anti-Semitism.
I think what he's trying to do is to erase any criticism of the secular state of Israel because that's what they're trying to conflate.
So we're talking about TikTok where young people are sharing videos saying, we don't like what Israel is doing in Gaza.
They're killing a lot of civilians.
Oh, anti-Semitism.
This guy's gone.
This guy's gone.
So the real goal here is to stop anyone from criticizing a foreign country far away.
Why Leaders Silence Critics 00:03:57
And we have to ask ourselves, why are our political leaders and the people whose salaries we pay, who gives them the power to do this overlay?
So when there's a problem, they use it as an excuse to do more harm by translating it and expanding on this to try to settle it.
They create a new problem thinking that's going to satisfy the goals of trying to get along with people.
Yeah, absolutely.
Well, I'm going to close out here.
And if you put that very last clip, we're going to skip that last video for now, but put that last clip up.
Just a reminder, we are in our, I wouldn't say final push.
We're getting close.
December 31st is our deadline to raise this $100,000 to unlock a $100,000 offered by a generous benefactor.
We are a third of the way there.
Take heart.
It may not look like we're as far as we should be or hope to be, but guess what?
You guys can all change that if you make that tax-deductible donation.
And of course, before December 31st, that means you can declare it On your tax return to the fullest extent of the law, and deprive some of that war money to the government.
We're at 29,119, almost 30% of our goal.
Help us make that up, please, if you can, and we definitely appreciate it.
Over to you, Dr. Paul.
Very good.
You know, this vote coming up, I want to reiterate how important I think this is, and that is on Thursday.
There's a vote coming up to say that the president can't start a war without consent of the Congress.
Astounding.
Wow, where did this come from?
Are they making this up?
I've never heard of this, that the Congress is supposed to declare war before we go to war.
But anyway, they're getting ready to do it.
And there are three Republican co-sponsors of this bill.
There was a vote on this, and it was very close.
It's conceivable that the people arguing for peace and going to war in a precise constitutional way may have a victory this week.
There are the three Republicans that support this, and those on the bill is Thomas Massey, Marjorie Taylor Greene, and Don Bacon.
So, and before the vote was closed, so I think that for it to pass, a lot of Republicans are going to have to vote for it.
But the people who will be most pressured are the ones who are supported by the military-industrial complex.
They need activities, and they need these wars going on, and they have all kinds of excuses for it.
And they'll do it, and they've convinced themselves.
I believe they brainwave themselves and they go about preaching this, thinking that they're bringing about peace and prosperity to the world.
I happen to disagree with that.
I think settling these fights with innuendos, fights, and threats does not work.
And it hasn't worked throughout history.
But right now, it seems like after a reasonable period of time, that people tried to emphasize the more peaceful approach.
But right now, I think the world is sort of breaking up on this and preparing for some real, real serious problems because economic problems go along with these foreign policies, and the economic problems are getting much worse.
And empires usually finish by a financial crisis, and the chances of that happening to us are high.
And hopefully, the people can wake up and realize it's not complicated, it's not difficult, because defending peace and prosperity should be, you know, an ideal for all of us.
World Breaking Up 00:00:08
And that is what we work for here at the Liberty Report.
I want to thank everybody for tuning in today to the Liberty Report.
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