By Alexandra Ulmer
PHOENIX, Arizona (Reuters) – U.S President-elect Donald Trump mentioned on Sunday he’ll launch a brand new anti-drug promoting marketing campaign to point out the bodily impression of taking medicine like fentanyl and repeated his menace to designate Mexican drug cartels as terrorist organizations.
“We’re going to advertise how bad drugs are for you. They ruin your look, they ruin your face, they ruin your skin, they ruin your teeth,” Trump mentioned at a convention of the conservative group Turning Level in Phoenix, Arizona.
Trump gave few concrete particulars concerning the advert marketing campaign, which he doesn’t seem to have talked about earlier than and that he likened to operating a political marketing campaign. He mentioned his administration would spend “a lot of money” on this system however that it could be a “very small amount of money, relatively.”
The Trump transition workforce didn’t reply to a request for additional data.
Trump’s plan has echoes of the “Just Say No” anti-drug marketing campaign, led by Republican former first woman Nancy Reagan within the Eighties to encourage younger Individuals to refuse medicine.
Between 50,000 and 60,000 Individuals are projected to die from artificial opioid overdoses this 12 months, most from taking fentanyl or carefully associated medicine.
The fentanyl disaster featured closely in Trump’s 2024 presidential marketing campaign, regardless that artificial opioid deaths greater than doubled below his 2017-2021 administration.
Trump on Sunday additionally revived a marketing campaign vow to designate Mexico’s drug cartels as terrorist teams.
“I will immediately designate the cartels as foreign terrorist organizations,” Trump mentioned.
Whereas in workplace in 2019, Trump shelved such a plan on the request of Mexico’s then-President Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador, who mentioned he wished U.S. cooperation on combating drug gangs, not intervention.
Some U.S. officers had additionally privately expressed misgivings that the measure might injury relations with Mexico and hinder the Mexican authorities’s battle in opposition to drug trafficking.
Trump’s official election platform says that when he takes workplace he’ll order the Pentagon to make use of “special forces, cyber warfare, and other covert and overt actions to inflict maximum damage on cartel leadership, infrastructure, and operations.”
