Fentanyl War: China's Empty Promises

Trump Says China Will Curtail Fentanyl. The U.S. Has Heard That Before.
By Sui-Lee Wee

Fentanyl seized at O’Hare International Airport in Chicago. United States officials cite China as the main source of illicit fentanyl brought into America.

BEIJING — China vows to stem the supply of the powerful opioid fentanyl flowing into the United States. 

It pledges to target exports of fentanyl-related substances bound for the United States that are prohibited there, while sharing information with American law-enforcement authorities.
Such empty promises, echoed in the recent meeting between the countries’ presidents, ring familiar.
They first emerged in September 2016, when the Obama administration said China and the United States had agreed on “enhanced measures”meant to keep fentanyl from coming into the United States. 

But in its official statements or state media reports made at the time, the Chinese government never specified the steps it intended to take, and its follow-up has been patchy at best.
So when the Trump administration said on Saturday that Xi Jinping had agreed to designate fentanyl as a controlled substance in “a wonderful humanitarian gesture,” analysts said there was little to cheer about.
“It’s in many ways all theater from the White House and very little serious substance,” said John Collins, executive director of the International Drug Policy Unit at the London School of Economics. 

“It seems to me the same story again.”
China is the main source of illicit fentanyl in the United States, where it helped drive total overdose deaths last year to more than 70,000 — a record. 

The assertion was supported by a report last month by the U.S.-China Economic and Security Review Commission, which Congress created to monitor relations between the countries.
Cracking down on the manufacturing and distribution of fentanyl in China is no easy task. 

As Mr. Collins noted, many classes of the drug are already considered controlled substances in the country. 

Fentanyl’s chemical structure and those of related analogues can be modified to create similar yet distinct substances, so new versions can be concocted quickly.
Because of fentanyl’s potency and the ease with which it can be produced, one kilogram bought for $3,000 to $5,000 in China can potentially kill 500,000 people, according to the Drug Enforcement Administration.
The Trump administration said that Xi’s announcement meant that people selling fentanyl to American buyers and shipping it into the United States would “be subject to China’s maximum penalty under the law”: the death penalty. 

China did not specify the punishment for violating the new ban, but anyone guilty of trafficking in controlled substances is subject to capital punishment.
The United States has long pushed China to systemically control all fentanyl substances. 

China’s approach has been to ban chemicals one by one, and only after getting evidence for why it should do so from the other countries and the United Nations.
The lag has allowed Chinese makers of illicit drugs to create new fentanyl derivatives faster than they can be controlled.

A pharmacy technician preparing syringes of fentanyl in a hospital. Although the powerful opioid has legitimate medical uses, it is also a major cause of addiction and overdose deaths.

China has said it would label 25 fentanyl substances and two precursors — the chemical ingredients that can be used to make the drug — controlled substances.

Jeremy Douglas, the regional representative of the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime for Southeast Asia and the Pacific, said “right now, there’s nothing stopping a pharmaceutical company or supplier from selling related but noncontrolled substances.”

He said he had clarified the announcement’s meaning with a senior official in Beijing, who told him that China would need to amend its laws before the full ban could take effect.
That process might take months, assuming China proceeds. 

As with other points of contention between the two countries, the problem for Washington is getting Beijing to fulfill its eternal promises.
Complicating the matter is the size of China’s chemical industry. 

State Department data shows that there are about 160,000 chemical companies in China. 

Weak regulation means that those producing fentanyl substances will probably still be willing to sell them despite the new ban.
“China controls the majority of global fentanyl sales, so it is a thriving industry there,” said Jeffrey Higgins, a retired special supervisory agent with the Drug Enforcement Administration. 

“There are economic incentives for the Chinese to let opioid production flourish and fewer incentives to restrict their economy to cooperate with foreign law enforcement. We will have to wait and see how much the Chinese government cracks down on fentanyl producers.”
There is also little awareness in China that the United States has an opioid problem, or that China is contributing to it.
During an informal meeting about health care cooperation in Virginia last month, American officials told senior officials from the China Food and Drug Administration and the Chinese Center for Disease Control and Prevention about America’s fentanyl problem.
Chen Xi, an assistant professor of public health at Yale University who was there, said the Chinese officials said that “they had never heard of this.”

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.

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.