The Peter Zeihan Podcast Series - Why There's No Fentanyl in Easter Eggs This Year || Peter Zeihan

Episode Date: April 27, 2025

US efforts against fentanyl have been ramping up. Specifically, the Trump administration has turned its focus to one specific Mexican cartel - La Familia Michoacana.Join the Patreon here: https://www.patreon.com/PeterZeihanFull Newsletter: https://mailchi.mp/zeihan/why-theres-no-fentanyl-in-easter-eggs-this-year

Hey, Peter Zion, here coming to you from Colorado. Happy Easter. Let's talk about drugs. Specifically, fentanyl. Last week, the Trump administration, these are courtesy of my niece, by the way, and my sister, and they have no taste. Anyway, last week, the Trump administration up to enforcement of basically financial sanctions against folks involved with the drug that trade in Mexico, specifically a group

pie, the name of La Familia Mihoa Khan, which is. is a cartel in the southern part of the country in Miolecon State. Why does this matter? Well, fentanyl is a really difficult drug to move against because it's a synthetic. It only takes a few seconds per dose to produce. Basically, you do 100,000 doses in a garage in the course of a week, as opposed to cocaine, which has a long agricultural supply chain stretching back to South America. And so most of the things that the United States has done before and during this current Trump administration has almost been pointless because if you're dealing with dozens,

hundreds, thousands of mom and pop operators that are building this stuff, a traditional military or law enforcement approach just doesn't work. The volumes are too small. They're too easy to smuggle. And since it's synthetic, you basically can put it anywhere.

So even if Mexico working with the United States or on its own was able to get rid of fentanyl production, it would just move to Oklahoma or Nevada or somewhere else. There's been a recent breakthrough with the de minimis shipping exception being close, and that will greatly reduce the volumes of the precursor materials that make it in from India and China, and that will complicate the drug production,

but it doesn't solve the problem. Ultimately, it's small-scale and it's hard to fight. Of course, within every general trend, there is an exception. The Familia Mihoi Khan is the exception. They are a cartel that instead of built around the smuggling of cocaine, is built around the mass production of fentanyl. They are the only one of the main. major narcotics trafficking groups in Mexico that has followed that business model.

And because they control the part of Lazaro Codenis, which is the largest Pacific port in Mexico, they have easy access to the raw materials that they need to basically produce fentanyl and an industrial pace. And they are largely immune to anything that happens with the de minimis exception or law enforcement in the United States. In many ways, they are powerful enough to be a state within a state, and they control all of the corruption that goes along in the port, well. So rooting them out is going to be very, very difficult. In addition, some of the military options that the Trump administration really are inappropriate for this, not just because this is a

major commercial port, and that would have a lot of complications and problems, but it's on the wrong side of the country. It is on the southern coast of Mexico. It is nowhere near the U.S. border. So it's just not in the sort of place that the Trump administration or the United States in general can act. That said, the Trump administration is definitely named and shamed. The brothers Olas Coagua, who are in charge of the cartel, are now bumped up on the most wanted list. And I believe the new bounty is $8 million in addition to a whole series of financial sanctions and indictments from U.S. federal prosecutors. There is no good solution here.

If there was, fentanyl wouldn't be a problem. But because there's an industrial scale production in this part of Mexico, U.S. authorities working in league with the Mexican government might actually be able to do something. It's one thing to go door to door through every Mexican and American city looking for a drug lab. It's quite another when you know the largest fentanyl labs in the world are in one specific city that happens to be a port. Doesn't make it easy, but it does mean that the sharp end of American power is a little bit more appropriate for this specific fight than for the rest of the drug war.