By Alexandra Ulmer
PHOENIX, Arizona (Reuters) – U.S. President-elect Donald Trump said on Sunday he will launch a new anti-drug advertising campaign to show the physical impact of using drugs such as fentanyl and reiterated his threat to designate Mexican cartels as drugs as terrorist organizations.
“We’re going to announce how bad drugs are for you. They ruin your appearance, they ruin your face, they ruin your skin, they ruin your teeth,” Trump said at a conference for the conservative group Turning Point in Phoenix, Arizona. .
Trump gave few concrete details about the ad campaign, which he does not appear to have mentioned before and which he likened to running a political campaign. He said his administration would spend “a lot of money” on the program, but that 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, spearheaded by former Republican first lady Nancy Reagan in the 1980s to encourage young Americans to reject drugs.
Between 50,000 and 60,000 Americans are projected to die from synthetic opioid overdoses this year, most from taking fentanyl or closely related drugs.
The fentanyl crisis featured prominently in Trump’s 2024 presidential campaign, even though deaths from synthetic opioids more than doubled during his 2017-2021 administration.
On Sunday, Trump also revived his campaign promise to designate Mexico’s drug cartels as terrorist groups.
“I will immediately designate the cartels as foreign terrorist organizations,” Trump said.
While in office 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 fears that the move could damage relations with Mexico and hamper the Mexican government’s fight against drug trafficking.
Trump’s official election platform 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.”