Poisoning the World

Chinese Are Getting Opioids Into the U.S. Through the Postal Service
By DESMOND BUTLER AND ERIKA KINETZ

United States Postal Service workers sort packages at the Lincoln Park carriers annex in Chicago, Illinois on Nov. 29, 2012.

WASHINGTON — Congressional investigators said Wednesday that Chinese opioid manufacturers are exploiting weak screening at the U.S. Postal Service to ship large quantities of illegal drugs to American dealers.
In a yearlong probe , Senate investigators found that Chinese sellers, who openly market opioids such as fentanyl to U.S. buyers, are pushing delivery through the U.S. postal system. 

The sellers are taking advantage of a failure by the postal service to fully implement an electronic data system that would help authorities identify suspicious shipments.
At a time of massive growth in postal shipments from China due to e-commerce, the investigators found that the postal system received the electronic data on just over a third of all international packages, making more than 300 million packages in 2017 much harder to screen. 

Data in the Senate report shows no significant improvement during 2017 despite the urgency.
The U.S. Postal Service said it has made dramatic progress in the last year in total packages with opioids seized by U.S. Customs and Border Protection.
“The Postal Service will continue to work tirelessly to address this serious societal issue,” spokesman David Partenheimer said in a statement.
He said implementing the use of electronic data is slowed by the need to negotiate with international partners, but the service is making progress.
The Senate probe matches many of the findings of a 2016 investigation by The Associated Press that detailed unchecked production in China of some of the world’s most dangerous drugs.
AP reporters found multiple sellers willing to ship carfentanil — an opioid used as an elephant tranquilizer that is so potent it has been considered a chemical weapon. 

The sellers also offered advice on how to evade screening by U.S. authorities.
Researchers on the Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations also contacted Chinese sellers directly. 

The sellers preferred payment in Bitcoin.
Investigators traced the online sellers to seven U.S. opioid deaths and 18 drug arrests. 

The Senate has cleared the report to be handed over to law enforcement.
In one case, the investigators traced orders from an online seller in China to a Michigan man who wired $200 in November 2016. 

The next month he received a package from someone identified by the investigators as a Pennsylvania-based distributor. 

A day later, the Michigan man died of an overdose from drugs, including a chemical similar to fentanyl.
The huge influx of opioids has led to a wave of overdose deaths across the U.S. in recent years. Republican Sen. Rob Portman, the subcommittee’s chairman, noted that fentanyl now kills more people in his home state than heroin.
“The federal government can, and must, act to shore up our defenses against this deadly drug and help save lives,” he said.

Exporting Death

China Delivered Lethal Opiates  By Mail, Killed Addicts In The U.S.
By Arun Rath

A drug lethal enough to be used as a chemical weapon — called carfentanil — has made its way into the illicit opiate trade. 

Carfentanil is an opiate 10,000 times more powerful than morphine.
And since last summer, it's been killing addicts and confounding first responders across the country.
The drug was never intended to be consumed by humans.
But it has been used to kill and immobilize humans — reportedly, in assassination attempts and by Russian Special Forces in 2002.
They apparently used it in aerosol form as a knockout gas to end a hostage situation.
Tragically, the gas ended up killing more than 100 hostages.
"Carfentanil is a synthetic opioid. It's of a drug class similar to fentanyl and other fentanyl analogs," Terry Boos says.
Boos is the section chief for the Diversion Control Division, of the DEA's Drug and Chemical Evaluation section.
He says the only legitimate use of the drug is as a tranquilizer for very large animals, like elephants or hippos.
So there's no medical literature to consult for its effects on humans.
That knowledge is being gained the hard way, by first responders.
"During the month of July [2016], paramedics in Akron registered more than 230 drug overdoses, with 14 of those being fatal," DEA spokesman Russ Baer says.
"Those were eventually linked to carfentanil. Thereafter we saw outbreaks throughout Ohio, particularly in Cincinnati."

Carfentanil oubreaks in several states
Baer says that since then, the DEA has found the drug in a number of states: "Florida, Georgia, Rhode Island, Indiana, Pennsylvania, Kentucky, West Virginia, New Jersey and Illinois."
He says the agency is still "tracking the presence and the proliferation" of carfentanil.
When the drug first appeared in Ohio, authorities had no idea what they were dealing with.
"In Cincinnati it took several days to get a sample of to be able to check it. And sure enough, many of the overdoses that had occurred in a spike were related to this carfentanil," Ohio Sen. Rob Portman says.

U.S. Drug Enforcement Agency, Lubbock Fire Department personnel help members of the DEA Hazardous Materials/Clandestine Laboratory Enforcement Team with a decontamination procedure in Lubbock, Texas in Oct. 2017.

The DEA rushed to bring toxicology labs across the country up to speed.
It's important for first responders to be able to recognize a carfentanil overdose.
They might, for instance, require multiple doses of the anti-overdose drug naloxone.
And since even the tiniest amount of carfentanil can kill, first responders who might encounter the drug need to take extra precautions.
That includes agents screening packages from overseas.
Carfentanil "normally comes in by the U.S. mail system, usually from China," Portman says.
"Some laboratory in China producing it, and then shipping it to the United States by mail."
He says the illicit sellers in China avoid private carriers like FedEx or UPS because they require tracking information from the sender. 
"With the U.S. mail system, that's not required. So China has an arrangement with the U.S. mail system where they send it through without that information," Portman says.

A bill for the U.S. Postal Service to track senders
Portman has co-sponsored a bill, the Synthetics Trafficking and Overdose Prevention, or STOP act.
Juliette Kayyem is a senior adviser to Americans for Screening All Packages (ASAP), one group backing the STOP act.
She says the new law would require the U.S. Postal Service to track senders the same way private shippers do.
"The sender is required to give you a valid name, address, content size of the package, who they're sending it to in the United States," Kayyem says.
Supporters say that even if illicit drug sellers put in false information, when the data from all the packages gets crunched, algorithms can still identify suspicious packages — so screeners know which ones to scrutinize out of the millions the postal service handles.
The STOP act stalled in the Senate last year, but Sen. Portman reintroduced the legislation last month, and is hopeful it can pass with bipartisan support.

In the meantime, the Chinese government has taken action of its own.
Largely at the request of the U.S., last month China announced the banning of the export of carfentanil along with three other opioids.
Baer of the DEA says that while fentanyl and its analogs remain a deadly problem, the percentage of overdoses associated with carfentanil have been on the decline in recent weeks.
And he's hopeful China's new ban on sales will help keep the deadly opioid out.

Trump push to combat drug trade means starting with China, not Mexico

By Andrew O'Reilly 

If President Trump wants to fulfill his campaign promise of stemming the flow of drugs coming across the United States’ border with Mexico, he may want to start by looking at China.
Manufacturers and organized crime groups in the world’s most populous country are responsible for the majority of fentanyl -- the synthetic opioid that is 50 times more potent than heroin -- that ends up in the U.S. and the majority of precursor chemicals used by Mexican drug cartels to make methamphetamine, according to numerous published U.S. government reports.
“The Mexican cartels are buying large quantities of fentanyl from China,” Barbara Carreno, a spokesperson with the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA), told FoxNews.com. 

“It’s much easier to produce than waiting around to grow poppies for heroin and it’s incredibly profitable.
The DEA estimates that a kilogram of fentanyl, which sells for between $2,500 and $5,000 in China, can be sold to wholesale drug dealers in the U.S. for as much as $1.5 million and that the demand for the drug due to the prescription opioid crisis in places like New England and the Midwest have kept the prices high.

What is fentanyl

• Fentanyl is a synthetic opioid, 50 times more potent than heroin, that's responsible for a recent surge in overdose deaths in some parts of the country. It also has legitimate medical uses.
• Doctors prescribe fentanyl for cancer patients with tolerance to other narcotics, because of the risk of abuse, overdose and addiction, the Food and Drug Administration imposes tight restrictions on fentanyl; it is classified as a Schedule II controlled substance.
• The DEA issued a nationwide alert about fentanyl overdose in March 2015. More than 700 fentanyl-related overdose deaths were reported to the DEA in late 2013 and 2014. Since many coroners and state crime labs don't routinely test for fentanyl, the actual number of overdoses is probably much higher.

Trump, along with numerous other presidential hopefuls, promised while on the stump in states hard-hit by drug addiction to quickly tackle the widespread use of drugs like fentanyl and heroin. 

While heroin addiction has been a concern for decades, in recent years the number of users of heroin and fentanyl -- and its more potent derivatives like carfentanil -- has skyrocketed as the government clamps down on the abuse of prescription opioids like OxyContin and Percocet.
"We're going to build that wall and we're going to stop that heroin from pouring in and we're going to stop the poison of the youth," Trump said during a September campaign stop in New Hampshire.
The problem with cracking down on fentanyl and its derivatives is that while these substances may be banned in the U.S., they may not be illegal in their country of origin. 

China, for example, only last year added 116 synthetic drugs to its controlled substances list, but failed to include carfentanil – a drug that is 10,000 times more potent than morphine and has been researched as a chemical weapon by the U.S., U.K., Russia, Israel, China, the Czech Republic and India.
“It can kill you if just a few grains gets absorbed through the skin,” Carreno said.
While Mexican cartels obtain these substances in large quantities through the murky backwaters of the Chinese black market, anybody with a credit card and Internet access can call one of the numerous companies in China’s freewheeling pharmaceutical industry that manufactures fentanyl and its more potent cousins.
Earlier this year, The Associated Press found at least 12 Chinese businesses that said they would export carfentanil to the United States, Canada, the United Kingdom, France, Germany, Belgium and Australia for as little as $2,750 a kilogram.
Besides synthetic opioids, Chinese companies are also producing massive amounts of the precursor chemicals used to make methamphetamine.
As the methamphetamine industry evolved over the last decade or so from small, homegrown operations in the U.S. to the super-labs run by Mexican cartels, cooks and producers of the drug have begun to rely more and more on China for their ingredients. 

Mexico now supplies 90 percent of the methamphetamine found in the U.S., and 80 percent of precursor chemicals used in Mexican meth come from China, according to a study by the U.S.-China Economic and Security Review Commission.
“China is the major source for precursor chemicals going to Mexico,” David Shirk, a global fellow at the Washington, D.C.-based Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars, told FoxNews.com. 

“The problem is finding who the connection is between organized crime groups in China and organized crime groups in Mexico.”
Shirk added that law enforcement and drug war experts generally have a good picture of the major players in Mexican organized crime, but the Chinese underworld is less well mapped and it is more difficult to pin down the major players in the drug trade there.
Despite U.S. efforts to crackdown on both the fentanyl and methamphetamine trades, U.S. government officials acknowledge that much of the onus lies with the Chinese. 

A U.S. State Department report found that drug-related corruption among local and lower-level Chinese officials continues to be a concern.
When he takes office in January, Trump has a few things working in his favor in respect to combatting the drug trade.
One is the continued fracturing of some of Mexico’s largest and most powerful drug cartels. 

The Sinaloa Cartel, for example, was seen for years as an impenetrable drug organization until cracks began to appear in its armor following the re-arrest earlier this year of its leader, Joaquín “El Chapo” Guzmán, and the power struggle that ensued.
“When the violence goes up, business always goes down,” Shirk said.

Poisoning The World

Chemical Weapon for Sale: China's Carfentanil
By ERIKA KINETZ AND DESMOND BUTLER

A member of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police opens a printer ink bottle containing the opioid carfentanil imported from China, in Vancouver, June 27, 2016.

The United States government is concerned that carfentanil, a powerful opioid that has caused a rash of overdose deaths, could be used as a chemical weapon and has discussed the matter with China, the State Department said Friday in response to an Associated Press investigation.
"Agents like carfentanil could be used in lethal doses that would make them comparable to traditional nerve agents, raising concerns that they could be used as chemical weapons," a State Department official said on condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to speak on the record.
U.S. officials addressed the issue with their Chinese counterparts at the G-20 summit of world leaders in September, and again last week at a scheduled meeting on law enforcement cooperation, the official said.
The AP identified 12 Chinese vendors willing to export carfentanil to the U.S., Canada, the United Kingdom, France, Germany, Belgium and Australia, in quantities that could kill millions of people, no questions asked.
"We can supply carfentanil ... for sure," a saleswoman from Jilin Tely Import and Export Co. wrote in broken English in a September email.
"And it's one of our hot sales product."
Carfentanil is so toxic an amount smaller than a poppy seed can kill a person, but it is not a controlled substance in China.
The U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration is also pressing China to blacklist carfentanil, but Beijing has yet to act, leaving a substance whose lethal qualities have been compared with Venomous Agent X, or VX, to flow unabated into foreign markets.
The AP did not actually buy any drugs, or test whether the substances on offer were genuine.
China's Ministry of Public Security did not respond to repeated requests for comment.
Carfentanil is 100 times more powerful than fentanyl, a related drug that itself is up to 50 times stronger than heroin.
Carfentanil's only routine use is as an anesthetic for elephants and other large animals.
It burst into view this summer as the latest scourge in an epidemic of opioid abuse that has killed tens of thousands in the U.S. alone.
Since July, there have been 19 deaths related to carfentanil in just the Detroit area, local health officials said Thursday.
On Friday, Canadian health officials announced that carfentanil was found in the bodies of two young men who took lethal overdoses of the drug.
China is the primary source of fentanyls and fentanyl precursors that end up in the United States, Canada, and Mexico, according to a July DEA intelligence brief.
Even as China's carfentanil manufacturers operate openly, efforts to tighten control of fentanyls under the Chemical Weapons Convention are intensifying.
Carfentanil and chemicals like it are already banned from the battlefield under the convention, which came into force in 1997.
Now 24 countries, including Australia, the U.S., Canada and Switzerland, are pushing for discussion on whether the convention could be used to block their use for domestic law enforcement as well.
"We believe these chemicals pose a serious challenge for the convention," the states said in a joint statement in December.
The letter noted "inherent safety risks that include potential long-term health effects."
For decades before being discovered by drug dealers, carfentanil and substances like it were researched as chemical weapons by the U.S., U.K., Russia, Israel, China, the Czech Republic and India, according to publicly available documents.
"It's a weapon," said Andrew Weber, assistant secretary of defense for nuclear, chemical and biological defense programs from 2009 to 2014.
"Companies shouldn't be just sending it to anybody."
Forms of fentanyl are suspected in an unsuccessful 1997 attempt by Mossad agents to kill a Hamas leader in Jordan, and were used to lethal effect by Russian forces against Chechen separatists who took hundreds of hostages at a Moscow theater in 2002.
The theater siege prompted the U.S. to develop strategies to counter carfentanil's potential use as a tool of war or terrorism, said Weber.
"Countries that we are concerned about were interested in using it for offensive purposes," he said. "We are also concerned that groups like ISIS could order it commercially."
More recently, dealers discovered that vast profits could be made by cutting fentanyls into illicit drugs.
In fiscal year 2014, U.S. authorities seized just 3.7 kilograms (8.1 pounds) of fentanyl.
This fiscal year, through just mid-July, they seized 134.1 kilograms (295 pounds), Customs and Border Protection data show.
Overdose rates have been skyrocketing.
Delegations of top Chinese and U.S. drug enforcement officials met in August and September to discuss opioids, but failed to produce a substantive announcement on carfentanil.
U.S. lawmakers are also looking for ways of cracking down on illegal imports — though it is unlikely Congress will pass any legislation this year.
Rep. Daniel Donovan, Jr., a Republican from New York, introduced a bill recently that would increase sentences for traffickers of opioids, including carfentanil.
It would also give the DEA power to issue emergency orders to classify new synthetic drugs for higher penalties.
In a statement, Donovan cited the AP investigation.
"We have to get fentanyl and its variants -- especially carfentanil -- and its traffickers off the streets immediately," Donovan said.
"They are, quite literally, killing people every day."
Last October, China added 116 synthetic drugs to its controlled substances list.
Acetylfentanyl, a weak fentanyl variant, was among them.
Several vendors contacted in September were willing to export carfentanil but refused to provide the far less potent acetylfentanyl.
Seven companies, however, offered to sell acetylfentanyl despite the ban.
Five offered fentanyl and two offered alpha-PVP, commonly known as flakka, which are also controlled substances in China.
Several vendors recommended shipping by EMS, the express mail service of state-owned China Postal Express & Logistics Co.
"EMS is a little slow than Fedex or DHL but very safe, more than 99% pass rate," a Yuntu Chemical Co. representative wrote in an email.
EMS declined comment.
A Yuntu representative hung up the phone when contacted by the AP and did not reply to emails.
Soon after, the company's website vanished.