Fentanyl as a weapon of mass destruction is a designation John Kiriakou rejects, in an exchange that began with the American military destroying three more alleged drug boats in the Pacific.
The Iraq parallel
The framing came first from his interlocutor: a president who ran successfully against the Iraq war, which had been sold on weapons of mass destruction that did not exist, now reaching for weapons of mass destruction again over Venezuela. Kiriakou drew the distinction that matters to him. Whatever else was wrong with the Iraq case, “At least we knew he was talking about either chemical, biological, or nuclear weapons as defined under international laws, WMDs. Here we’re redefining a drug as a weapon of mass destruction, which by definition can’t be because a weapon of mass destruction is an individual weapon that goes off and kills lots and lots of people all at once.”[1]
He closed off the obvious workaround himself: “you can give drugs to lots and lots of people. You could poison the water supply with drugs. That still wouldn’t make it a weapon of mass destruction.”[2]
Why the stretching matters
Kiriakou’s objection is not pedantic but functional. “not only do I not understand it, I disagree with it because declaring fentinel a weapon of mass destruction so cheapens the process that it makes the whole process kind of laughable and ineffective.”[3]
His comparison is the terrorist designation of Antifa, which he illustrates with a video he says he had posted the day before: two military veterans filming themselves walking into FBI headquarters to announce “Hi, we’re both Antifa field commanders. We want to turn ourselves in.” The agents, in his telling, did not know what to do with them and would not take them — “We we don’t know what to do. You should just leave.” His gloss: “Same thing. Fentinel, weapon of mass destruction. Come on.”[4][5]
The factual objection
Underneath the definitional one lies a simpler point about the target. Venezuela, he says, does not make fentanyl at all — “and whatever they’re sending, which is probably cocaine, is not going to the United States anyway.” Where it goes, he says, is Western Europe.[6]