The massive export of fentanyl from China has already caused hundreds of thousands of deaths and billions of dollars in economic losses in the United States. Experts say that the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) deliberately allows the drugs to flow into the United States. The recent prosecution of related Chinese companies can be seen as the United States firing the first shot in the counterattack.
On June 23, the U.S. Department of Justice announced two arrests in the Southern and Eastern Districts of New York and released three indictments charging four Chinese companies and eight Chinese nationals with crimes related to the production and sale of fentanyl precursors. This is the first time that Chinese companies and Chinese nationals have been prosecuted in the United States for the sale of fentanyl precursors. During the operation, the Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) seized more than 200 kilograms (440 lbs.) of fentanyl precursors, an amount large enough to kill 25 million Americans.
Fentanyl is a highly addictive synthetic opioid that is 50 times more potent than heroin and 100 times more potent than morphine.
Fentanyl and its analogs have wreaked havoc in communities across the United States and exacerbated the overdose problem. The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) estimated that fentanyl killed about 110,000 Americans by 2022. Fentanyl is now the leading cause of death among Americans aged 18–49.
Amarvel Biotech, based in Wuhan, Hubei, was one of four companies indicted by the U.S. Department of Justice on June 23.
The company claimed online that it was shipping fentanyl precursor chemicals to the United States and Mexico.
Drug cartels operate clandestine laboratories in Mexico that synthesize these precursors into finished fentanyl on a large scale and sell them throughout the United States.
In order to successfully transport the drugs to the United States and Mexico, these Chinese companies go to great lengths. They claim to guarantee a “100 percent invisible shipment,” which means using deceptive packaging, for example, claiming the contents are dog food, nuts, or motor oil.
DEA chief Anne Milgram said these companies also chemically camouflage their products in the lab.
Small Fraction of Illicit Cases
The Chinese drug manufacturers charged by the United States on June 23 are just a small fraction of companies involved in such illegal activity. According to National Public Radio, there are more than 100 suppliers of fentanyl or related chemicals in China. They use online networks to blatantly sell fentanyl analogs and fentanyl precursors, and ship them directly to customers in the United States and Europe, as well as to Mexican cartels.The production and export of fentanyl is growing rapidly inside some unnoticed labs in China.
A U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement official in China told NPR that inside a laboratory in Hebei Province housed in a sprawling industrial warehouse complex, drug investigators found a high-volume fentanyl manufacturing plant, all located in two small rooms, with “product drying on tape in sheet cake pans.”
In November 2018, Chinese police, acting on information from the U.S. side, seized more than 26 pounds of fentanyl and 42 pounds of other drugs from the lab, according to the NPR report.
C4ADS, the Center for Advanced Defense Studies, identified the detailed locations of 92 fentanyl-selling entities in China, 41 percent of which were located in Shijiazhuang, the capital of Hebei Province, just 154 miles away from Beijing.
The United States has been trying to urge the CCP to strengthen the supervision of fentanyl-like drugs through diplomatic channels. After years of U.S. diplomatic pressure, Chinese leader Xi Jinping reached an agreement with President Donald Trump at the G20 summit in December 2018 to include all synthetic opioids in the regulatory program.
However, since then, China has remained a major source of fentanyl in the United States, as Chinese-made fentanyl products now enter the United States through Mexico instead. Mexican criminal groups purchase fentanyl precursors from China and then traffic finished fentanyl to the United States.
New Opium War
James Lewis, senior vice president of the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS), a Washington think tank, told The Epoch Times on June 26 that he believes the Chinese communist regime does not really care about fentanyl precursors going to the United States, and would not provide any actual help to resolve the U.S. fentanyl crisis.“They may even see it as payback from the Opium Wars,” he said.
Between 1840 and 1842, China’s Qing Dynasty pursued a closed-door policy and tribute system, which led to diplomatic conflicts and trade imbalances between China and the United Kingdom. The Qing government’s strong measures to ban the opium trade, which violated the diplomatic bottom line of the British envoy and the fundamental interests of British merchants, eventually led to a military conflict between the Qing Empire and the British Empire. This was known as the First Opium War.
This war resulted in the widespread proliferation of opium in China. The National Army Museum of the United Kingdom documented that China had an estimated 10 million opium addicts by the year 1840.
Today’s America bears similarities to the phenomenon seen in China 180 years ago. According to the testimony of Vanda Felbab-Brown, the Director of the Brookings Institution’s project, during a congressional hearing in March 2023, drug overdose has resulted in over one million deaths in the United States since 1999. Since the significant influx of synthetic opioid drugs from China starting in 2012, the mortality rate has dramatically increased. In 2021, the death toll was 106,699; and by 2022, the estimated death toll was 107,477. The majority of these deaths are attributed to fentanyl.
In their article “China Wages a Drug War,” Retired U.S. Navy Captain Jim Fanell and William C. Triplett II, a recognized specialist in national security matters, said that the CCP is waging a “hot war” against the United States by importing fentanyl into the country.
“Americans are dying at an annual rate that is higher than during the entirety of the Vietnam War,” the article stated.
According to a report by the Council on Foreign Relations, the opioid death toll in the United States soared to 80,411 in 2021, more than ten times the number of U.S. military deaths in the post-9/11 wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.
Anne Arundel County, Maryland, reported that nearly 200 people died from drug overdoses in the county in 2017. Despite government resources to combat the opioid influx, the county had more opioid overdose deaths than traffic accidents, homicides, and suicides in 2016. And Anne Arundel County is not an ordinary county; it is home to the U.S. Naval Academy, the National Security Agency (NSA), and many high-paying government contracting programs. However, the county has been inundated by a wave of fentanyl from China.
Anders Corr, the founder of Corr Analytics Inc. and Epoch Times contributor, told The Epoch Times on June 24: “The deaths should be considered a direct attack on the United States and genocidal by the U.N. definition. Arrests and sanctions on individuals are insufficient—the sanctions should be against the CCP’s top leadership and against the Chinese economy as a whole.”
In addition to causing a large number of deaths of U.S. citizens, the influx of fentanyl has also devastated the U.S. economy. In 2022, the Joint Economic Committee (JEC) of Congress found that the opioid epidemic cost the country nearly $1.5 trillion in 2020, or 7 percent of gross domestic product (GDP), an increase of about one-third from 2017. The JEC predicted that this growth will continue due to the rising number of drug overdose cases.
The opioid epidemic is also taking a toll on the U.S. workforce. Researchers estimated in 2022 that of the about 6.3 million people missing from the U.S. workforce compared to pre-pandemic numbers, roughly 20 percent of that number was caused by opioids.
Corr believes that the CCP’s lack of cooperation on drug control is intentional, like the retaliation for Nancy Pelosi’s trip to Taiwan.
Following U.S. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s visit to Taiwan last August, the CCP imposed a series of retaliations on the United States, including suspending cooperation with Washington to curb drug trafficking and suspending an agreement reached between Xi and Trump in 2018.
Sen. Joni Ernst (R-Iowa) told CBS that based on briefings she has received, she believes that “the Chinese are intentionally poisoning America. ... And of course, the Chinese don’t want to assist us with this.”
