China’s Role In Fentanyl Crisis Back In Spotlight As Tariffs Loom

Authroed by Catherine Yang via The Epoch Times (emphasis ours),

When President-elect Donald Trump announced a hike in his tariff plans for China, as well as U.S. trade partners Canada and Mexico, he drew attention to China’s involvement in the illicit fentanyl crisis in the United States.

The day one plan would add 10 percent duty on top of the tariffs Trump already has planned for Chinese products, and a 25 percent tariff on all products coming in through Canada and Mexico.

Trump said on Nov. 25 that the three countries have not done enough to help the United States stem illegal immigration and the entry of illicit drugs.

Over the past two administrations, including Trump’s first term, Beijing has made a number of promises to help curb the movement of illicit fentanyl but kept few of them.

Fentanyl is an FDA-approved synthetic opioid used to treat severe pain, such as in open-heart surgery, or epidurals for mothers in labor.

Illicit fentanyl, however, is often mixed with other drugs, and illicit drug makers are increasingly producing analogs, or drugs similar to fentanyl, with small molecular changes that can make the drug up to 100 times more deadly.

Fentanyl is already a potent drug—2 milligrams is enough to be a lethal dose depending on a person’s size.

Illicit fentanyl and its various analogs have been linked to nearly 400,000 deaths in the United States since 2016. The United States has identified China as the primary source of illicit fentanyl coming in across the border since at least 2017 and the source of other drugs years before that.

In 2023, the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) seized more than 80 million fentanyl-laced pills and nearly 12,000 pounds of fentanyl powder, representing 390 million lethal doses, more than the population of the United States.

Steve Yates, a China expert and former national security official in the George W. Bush administration, has made recommendations to Trump advisers on fentanyl policy. He and others say sanctions on Chinese banks for backing money launderers and chemical sellers will accomplish what diplomacy to date has not.

“When you don’t do those things, then you’re a doormat,” Yates told Reuters.

David Asher, a top former U.S. anti-money laundering official who helped target the finances of the Islamic State terrorist group, said this mechanism has been used against designated foreign adversaries like Iran but never Mexican or Canadian banks.

“You need to hit all the bankers. It’s sort of basic,” said Asher, who has recommended criminal indictments against Chinese and Mexican financial institutions, bounties on traffickers, and other measures.

China Agreements

Fentanyl-linked deaths sharply increased in 2016. Near the end of President Barack Obama’s term, China agreed to block exports of precursor chemicals, or ingredients, used to make methamphetamine, fentanyl, and its analogs to the United States.

Trump, who had campaigned on stopping the opioid crisis, formed a commission to combat the issue in March 2017 and declared a public health emergency in October that year.

The DEA increased its presence in China and engaged Chinese regime drug authorities to try to block shipments to the United States. The DEA has met with Chinese officials about blocking fentanyl since 2014 and held expert-level bilateral meetings in 2017 and 2018 to satisfy Chinese demands for more information about how these drugs were being used. This resulted in Beijing putting several key fentanyl precursors on a control list.

By 2019, Trump had secured another promise from Chinese communist regime leader Xi Jinping that China would curb exports of all fentanyl variants to the United States, putting them on an export control list.

But while the DEA and the U.S. Postal Service found that imports from China indeed decreased by 2020, the DEA noted that illicit fentanyl and analogs were increasingly coming in from Mexico.

Experts and officials have determined that precursor chemicals—which can be hard to ban if they have benign, legal applications—are shipped from China to Mexico, where local labs finish the process to create illicit fentanyl and analogs.

DEA officials note that the drugs are cheap to manufacture, as Mexican labs can buy $3,000 worth of Chinese fentanyl and sell it for $1.5 million on American streets.

Former DEA official Derek Maltz told The Epoch Times that tariffs only address one aspect of a vast and complex problem, but they certainly help and, more importantly, signal that the incoming administration will show strong leadership on the issue.

“We have to be more aggressive to get [Beijing] to cooperate more than they have in the past,” he told The Epoch Times.

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