Stop killing Americans with fentanyl!

That’s the clear message behind the Trump fentanyl tariffs on China, Canada and Mexico.

Today, China continues to provide the flood of precursor chemicals that the Mexican drug cartels use to manufacture fentanyl in both Mexico and Canada.

The Trump fentanyl tariffs include a 20% tariff on all products from China over and above existing tariffs, along with a 25% tariff on all Canadian and Mexican products not covered by the United States Mexico Canada Agreement.

Retaliation by China, Canada or Mexico will not save a single American life.

What America needs is a solemn commitment from each country and appropriate actions that will immediately stop the fentanyl carnage.

The status quo is NOT an option.

The fentanyl crisis is down to two degrees of separation: Every American is a fentanyl victim because every American knows someone — or knows someone who knows someone — who has lost a son or daughter or relative or friend. 

Despair and suffering is rampant among survivors.

This slow-moving weapon of mass destruction, as some have called fentanyl, now costs Americans trillions of dollars a year.

The list of charges include both criminal-justice and health-care costs together with a massive loss in productivity — fentanyl is the leading cause of death of prime working-age men and women and military-age youth.

Fentanyl-related deaths officially exceed 70,000 a year, about the same number of Americans killed annually by motor-vehicle accidents and gunshot wounds.

Yet, this estimate grossly underestimates the death toll because of fentanyl’s diabolically versatile use as an additive to both other illegal drugs and fake prescription drugs.

Fentanyl’s versatility as a drug additive is attributable to its potency, low cost, ease of smuggling and highly addictive properties.

Fentanyl is 50 times stronger than heroin. Its ingestion leads to a much more rapid and intense high that mirrors the heroin high but makes it tougher to kick.

Just four pounds of fentanyl can kill nearly 1 million Americans, and a comparable dose of heroin is five to 10 times more expensive than fentanyl.

No wonder the Mexican drug cartels love to “cut” heroin with Chinese fentanyl to fool end users and turn an even bigger, albeit far more deadly, buck.

Yet, it’s not just heroin that the drug cartels spike with fentanyl.

It’s also other illegal drugs like cocaine, methamphetamine (speed), and MDMA (Ecstasy).

Alarmingly, China’s government actually subsidizes the production of fentanyl’s precursor chemicals through large government subsidies and other financial incentives to Chinese chemical manufacturers.

China’s drug merchants of death, in a modern day version of the “Opium Wars,” then ship these deadly exports in 50-gallon drugs to ports up and down the Mexican coast.

Because several of these Mexican ports are actually owned or controlled by China itself, including Mexico’s largest port Lázaro Cárdenas, there is rarely any danger of interdiction.

That drug cartels also provide much of the security for the chemicals from China at the ports adds an extra layer of protection from any government customs officials who haven’t been bribed or coerced.

The Chinese government could shut this fentanyl trade down at its source in a matter of days using all of the various tools of its authoritarian government.

But it has chosen not to do so dating back all the way to a famous Trump tweet on Aug. 23, 2019 — “President Xi said this would stop — it didn’t.”

President Trump correctly identified that Canada and Mexico were asleep at the wheel and not combatting fentanyl trafficking sufficiently.

The tariffs he imposed kicked those nations into gear, and they are now starting to act to combat this problem.

Here, we must dispense with the myth that fentanyl only kills those addicts ensnared in illegal drug use.

Indeed, the last, and largely hidden, threat is one that should be a wake-up call to any American who takes prescription drugs and thinks it is only drug addicts at risk from fentanyl poisoning.

This threat comes in the form of an equally deadly panoply of fake prescription drugs laced with fentanyl — painkillers like Oxycodone and Vicodin, sleeping pills like Ambien, anti-depressants like Xanax, attention disorder drugs like Adderall and “downers” like valium.  

Unwary Americans in search of bargain prices for these drugs find them on many of America’s social-media platforms, while more sophisticated web denizens can go right to the dark web to perhaps unwittingly commit suicide.

The numbers are staggering: Over 80 million doses of fake prescription drugs laced with fentanyl were seized by the Drug Enforcement Agency in the latest statistics available.

By the rule of 10, the number of fake pills laced with deadly fentanyl may well now be approaching nearly a billion pills annually — enough to kill us all.  

As a final cautionary note, the pill presses are of extremely high quality so that the fake pills themselves, along with their packaging, are now so indistinguishable from the actual real drugs that even drug-company detectives can’t detect counterfeits without mass spectrometry and chromatography.

President Trump has promised to break the back of this deadly fentanyl trade, and he has called on China, Canada and Mexico for their cooperation.

The tariff ball is now in their court.

Retaliation is not an option — at least one that will deter President Trump from his duty and promise to the American people.

This is not a partisan issue — it is an American crisis imported from foreign lands.

We must all be united now against it.

Peter Navarro is the White House senior counselor for trade and manufacturing.