United States President Donald Trump has said that China may start sentencing people to death for involvement in the manufacture or distribution of fentanyl, whose trafficking Trump has sought harsh measures to counteract.

Speaking as he signed anti-drug legislation on Wednesday, the US president said that the need to combat fentanyl was one of the reasons for his imposition of tariffs on countries across the world.

“I think we’re going to work it out so that China is going to end up going from that to giving the death penalty to the people that create this fentanyl and send it into our country,” Trump said. “I believe that’s going to happen soon.”

China, which has long imposed severe penalties on people involved with drug distribution, including capital punishment, has been at the centre of Trump’s ire over the opioid that helped fuel an overdose epidemic in the US.

The country raised outrage when it executed four Canadian dual citizens earlier this year for drug-related offences, despite pleas for clemency from the Canadian government.

Experts have questioned whether such penalties will help address the distribution of fentanyl, which China has said is driven largely by demand from people in the US.

Trump has previously linked his tariffs on countries such as Mexico and Canada to fentanyl, although trafficking from the latter into the US is close to nonexistent.

Drug overdoses in the US have been a subject of concern and political debate for years, with the country’s opioid epidemic beginning with the aggressive promotion of painkillers by pharmaceutical companies but later being mostly driven by synthetic opioids such as fentanyl.

Overdose deaths have started to drop in recent years, giving experts cause for optimism after years of communities being ravaged by opioids. Overdoses over a 12-month period ending in June 2024 dropped by 12 percent compared with the same period the previous year, down from 113,000 to 97,000.