# Banal Terrorism - Synthesis B By:: [[Brian Heath]] 2025-12-16 The latest designation of fentanyl as a "weapon of mass destruction" may be the rhetorical escalation that finally collapses the frame. When everything becomes terrorism, nothing is; when a powder cooked by garage chemists to meet American demand becomes equivalent to a nuclear warhead, the category announces its own bankruptcy. This is the unintended gift of overreach; it reveals the exhaustion of the warfare metaphor that has structured drug policy for half a century. Fentanyl exists because Americans love drugs and have the money to pay for them; the "weapon" is pointed inward, manufactured to spec by amateur chemists responding to market signals as old as capitalism itself. Calling this a WMD is like declaring war on your own appetite. The enable/obfuscate framework and the relational dynamics of escalation both assume the game continues indefinitely, each side ratcheting upward until violence or collapse. But there is a third possibility: absurdity. The parent who lost a child to fentanyl and the policy reformer who sees militarization as madness may find themselves equally unable to take "WMD" seriously. Something that cannot be spoken with a straight face cannot sustain political energy. The question becomes what emerges in the vacuum. Historically, exhausted frameworks do not give way to better ones automatically; they create openings that can be filled by wisdom or by something worse. The Reformation's religious wars eventually produced tolerance, but only after generations of bloodshed made the alternative unthinkable. Perhaps the WMD designation is our "angels dancing on pinheads" moment, the sign that a paradigm has eaten itself. If so, the task is not to win the rhetorical arms race but to be ready with something genuinely new when the combatants finally notice their weapons have become jokes. #### Related Items [[Language]] [[Absurd]] [[War]] [[Drugs]] [[American]] [[Politics]] [[Paradigms]]