A new anti-drug program will be promoted by the president-elect of the United States, Donald Trump, who also revived a campaign promise in which he threatened to designate Mexican cartels as terrorist groups.
US President-elect Donald Trump said Sunday he will launch a new anti-drug advertising campaign to show the physical impact of using drugs like fentanyl and reiterated his threat to designate Mexican drug cartels as terrorist organizations.
“We're going to advertise how bad drugs are for you. They ruin your looks, they ruin your face, they ruin your skin, they ruin your teeth,” Trump said at a conference of the conservative group Turning Point in Phoenix, Arizona.
Trump gave few concrete details about the campaign, which he did not appear to have mentioned before and which he likened to running a political campaign. According to him, his administration will spend “a lot of money” on the program, although he said it would be a “very small amount of money, relatively.”
Trump's transition team did not respond to a request for more information.
Trump's plan has echoes of the “Just Say No” anti-drug campaign, led by former Republican first lady Nancy Reagan in the 1980s to encourage young people to reject drugs.
It is estimated that between 50,000 and 60,000 Americans will die from synthetic opioid overdoses this year, most from use of fentanyl or closely related drugs.
The fentanyl crisis featured prominently in Trump's 2024 campaign, even though deaths from synthetic opioids more than doubled under his administration from 2017 to 2021.
Trump on Sunday also revived a campaign promise to designate Mexican drug cartels as terrorist groups.
“I will immediately designate the cartels as foreign terrorist organizations,” he said.
During his term in 2019, Trump shelved that plan at the request of then-Mexican President Andrés Manuel López Obrador, who said he wanted U.S. cooperation in the fight against drug gangs, not intervention.
Some U.S. officials had also privately expressed misgivings that the move could damage relations with Mexico and hamper the Mexican government's fight against drug trafficking.
Trump's official election manifesto says that when he takes office he will direct the Pentagon to use “special forces, cyber warfare, and other covert and overt actions to inflict maximum damage on cartel leadership, infrastructure, and operations.”