Is the Sino-US Fentanyl Pipeline Really Responsible for the US Opioid Crisis? | Fentanyl

Donald Trump has said his favorite word is tariff, which he describes as the most beautiful word in the dictionary.

It was therefore expected on Monday that he would impose customs duties of 25% on imports from China, Mexico and Canada. He also separately introduced an additional 10% tariff on imports from China, which even if passed would be far lower than the 60% rate Trump had threatened on the campaign trail.

More surprising is the US president-elect's assertion that the tariffs are a response to China's failure to curb the flow of fentanyl to the United States.

“I have had numerous discussions with China about the massive quantities of drugs, particularly fentanyl, being sent to the United States, but to no avail,” Trump wrote. Chinese officials told me they would impose the maximum penalty of death on any drug trafficker caught doing this, but unfortunately they never followed through and the drugs are flowing into our country. countries, mainly via Mexico, at levels never seen before. . Until they stop, we will impose additional 10% tariffs on China.

China has disputed this characterization of the flow of deadly synthetic opioids to the United States. On Tuesday, a Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesperson said: China is one of the strictest countries in the world when it comes to counter-narcotics, both in terms of policy and implementation. Fentanyl is a problem for the United States. In the spirit of humanity, China supported the US response to this issue.

What is fentanyl?

Fentanyl is a synthetic opioid that is much more potent than heroin. Although it has legitimate medical uses for managing pain, it is also at the heart of the opioid crisis in the United States. Last year, nearly 75,000 people died from fentanyl overdoses in the United States. The White House describes fentanyl as a scourge that has no geographic or political boundaries while Vanda Felbab-Brown, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, said the crisis is the deadliest drug epidemic ever known in the world. the history of humanity.

How much comes from China?

Fentanyl began arriving in the United States from China about 10 years ago. In 2020, the United States Drug Enforcement Administration said China was the primary source of fentanyl and fentanyl-related substances trafficked through international mail. As U.S. and Chinese authorities have cracked down on traffickers and criminal gangs, much of that flow has been redirected to cartels in Mexico. Rather than sending shipments of finished illicit fentanyl directly to the United States, Chinese drug traffickers and exporters send precursor chemicals to Mexico, where they can be processed into fentanyl and shipped to the United States.

What has China done to curb the flow of fentanyl to the United States?

The 2010s were a positive moment for U.S.-China cooperation on fentanyl. In 2019, at the request of the United States, China scheduled all forms of fentanyl, the only major country to permanently include these drugs on a list of controlled substances. In the United States, fentanyl analogues are only temporarily controlled, with their classification expiring in December 2024.

But in 2022, when then-Speaker Nancy Pelosi visited Taiwan, Beijing reacted angrily by cutting off several channels of communication with the United States, including counter-terrorism cooperation. narcotics.

It was only last year, when Joe Biden and Xi Jinping met in San Francisco, that bilateral negotiations on fentanyl were reopened. In recent months, China has scheduled fentanyl precursors that have been banned internationally, catching up on measures to block the flow of chemicals used to make fentanyl as well as blocking the flow of the drug itself. In theory, this would make it easier to combat drug traffickers.

China and the United States also agreed to cooperate in combating money laundering. Chinese and Mexican organized crime gangs constitute the financial backbone of the international fentanyl trade.

But China insists that the fentanyl crisis is, at heart, a problem that the United States itself created. The root cause of this overdose lies with the United States itself, which is calling on the American government for more effective measures, Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesperson Mao Ning said last month.

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