Chemical warfare: Death by China

China Is Fueling a Drug War Against the US
BY MIKE RIGGS
Despite what you may have heard about Mexico and its cartels, the global drug war's biggest Whac-A-Mole hole for nearly two decades has been China.
The bath salts and "spice" that dominated American drug headlines in recent years? Those came from Chinese chemical factories.
The Mexican cartels that have made most of our meth since regulators snuffed out America's artisanal speed industry?

They buy their precursor chemicals from China.
Nearly every synthetic drug you can buy in the U.S. — legally or illegally, from cathinones to steroids to the heart medication your doctor prescribed — came from China.
And if it wasn't made in China, it was made in India, which is a good place to make illegal things for the same reasons: It's massive, loosely regulated, increasingly population-dense, and home to hundreds of millions of people looking to turn a buck.
In what is now becoming a full-fledged drug reporting genre, MSNBC published a short video from Jacob Soboroff explaining just how easy it is to order fentanyl—a growing cause of overdose deaths in the U.S.—through Chinese websites accessible on the open internet:

Deadly opioid fentanyl is being ordered online & shipped direct to USA from China. Here's how. #OneNationOverDosed https://t.co/6cpSL3ZVj9

— Jacob Soboroff (@jacobsoboroff) August 9, 2017

In a New York Times piece from 2015, reporter Dan Levin did something similar, calling up a Chinese chemical factory and running through an incomplete list of drugs available for purchase through Chinese websites: spice, bath salts, precursors for meth, the stimulant "flakka" (remember when that was popular for 10 minutes or so?), and an entire universe of "research chemicals" that mimic banned substances but technically aren't illegal.
"We're seeing cases nationwide and ground zero always seems to be China," an assistant district attorney from New York told Levin.
On top of that, a 2016 study from the Office of the US Trade Representative reported that 97 percent of the counterfeit prescription drugs intercepted at U.S. points of entry came from China.
Soboroff seems genuinely shocked that it's so easy to order drugs this way.
I will confess to also being rather surprised when a Chinese chemical factory representative reached out to me after Reason published my recent feature on steroids.
The rep sent me links to a reddit thread featuring reviews of his factory and a list of illegal compounds they could make in whatever quantity I desired. 
He also offered to send me free samples and guaranteed free re-shipping in the event my package was intercepted by U.S. Customs. (I did not take him up on his offer.)
A few of the underground lab operators I've spoken to here in the U.S. say that ordering from China is a relatively safe, hassle-free, and common way to do business.
Many nutritional supplement companies, meanwhile, order their research chemicals from vendors on Alibaba, which is like the Chinese version of Amazon, if Amazon were also a B2B hub.
This is the 21st century drug trade.
Global supply chains work nearly as well for illegal goods as they do for legal ones. 
Research chemists are producing very effective analogs faster than anyone can regulate them.
The sheer import volume of first-world countries all but guarantees vast amount of banned goods will escape detection.
We will hear more in the coming months and possibly years about the threat posed by drug makers in China.
Law enforcement bodies will claim they're taking the necessary steps to curtail the practice.
The U.S. Justice Department, meanwhile, has asked the U.S. Sentencing Commission to rewrite federal sentencing guidelines in such a way that prosecutors would no longer be tasked with explaining the relationship between a banned compound and a grey market analog.
The current process, the Justice Department wrote in a July 31 letter, "is cumbersome, inefficient, and resource-intensive. It turns sentencing hearings into lengthy chemistry and pharmacology lectures, often complete with dueling experts."
The department is asking the Sentencing Commission to adopt a "class approach" that would allow judges to forgo determining a synthetic drug's potency and harm relative to a banned substance, and simply to treat all similar analogs the same.
None of these maneuvers will drastically change the landscape.
"Even if you could stop all manufacture of these substances in China today, there is a chance that someone in the U.S. or Canada could pick up the manufacturing," a U.N. synthetic drug expert told STAT News last year.
The Food and Drug Administration, meanwhile, can't keep up with U.S. supplement manufacturers who are incorporating Chinese-made research chemicals into their product lines.
The agency's latest target is an anabolic steroid mimetic called ostarine.
The effective dose for that drug is roughly 5 milligrams; it goes for about $2 a gram on Alibaba.
By the time the FDA has sent letters to every person selling Ostarine in the U.S., manufacturers and consumers will have moved on to the next thing.
This is how global markets work, and they will only get faster and more complex.

Sina Delenda Est

The Eight China Wars the World Should Know About
Peter Navarro

Global stock exchanges were devastated this week by the worst collapse in history as a wave of panic selling followed the sun from Asia through Europe and back to Wall Street.
The pandemonium was triggered by a Chinese government announcement that it would no longer finance the mounting budget and trade deficits of a “profligate United States” that “refuses to live within its means” and that “insists on scapegoating China for its own internal economic problems.” Nor would China continue to try to prop up “an increasingly worthless dollar.”
As the Chinese began dumping U.S. assets on Wall Street, both stock and bond prices plummeted. The panic soon spread to other exchanges around the world as gold soared to more than $1,000 an ounce and fear of a global depression deepened.
China’s actions have been widely interpreted as harsh retaliation for U.S. congressional passage of stiff protectionist tariffs on a wide range of manufactured goods. 

With the presidential election less than a month away, both houses of Congress up for electoral grabs, and the U.S. economy stuck in reverse, Republicans and Democrats alike are pushing additional legislation addressing everything from the growing trade in Chinese counterfeit goods, illegal drugs, and ballistic missiles to the international spillover from China’s mounting environmental pollution.
It’s been a tough year for Sino-U.S. relations. 

In January, the U.S. ambassador to the United Nations stormed out in protest over “the repeated crass commercial use” by China of its U.N. veto to “shield terrorist regimes such as Iran from diplomatic sanctions in exchange for oil.” 

In March, China’s president abruptly cancelled a state visit after the U.S. Treasury Department branded China a “currency manipulator.”
During an unusually hot August that raised collateral fears of global warming, the U.S. Pacific Fleet engaged in a tense, week-long standoff over Taiwan with China’s recently acquired, and nuclear missile-equipped, blue water navy.
Meanwhile, domestic unrest in China continues to escalate as an increasingly restive population seeks greater income equality, more worker rights, improved health care, a cleaner environment, a halt to widespread government corruption, and an end to massive public works projects such as the Three Gorges Dam that have displaced millions of people without adequately compensating them.
A recent report released by the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency has warned that should such domestic unrest reach a boiling point in China, the result may be “sharper military conflicts with the United States, Taiwan, and possibly even Japan as Chinese leaders seek to unify the now increasingly fractured nation against a ‘common enemy.’”
The best of economic times for China are fast becoming the worst of times for the rest of us.
China’s “cowboy capitalism” and amoral foreign policies are triggering a whole range of economic, financial, environmental, political, and military tsunamis that threaten to engulf us as well as the Chinese people.
The ever-growing dangers lay in a model of rapid, unsustainable economic growth, coupled with a wanton disregard for both human life and intellectual property.
The myriad dangers from the Coming China Wars are real and increasingly personal.
Consider these scenarios, based on actual events:

1. Your father almost dies from a massive heart attack because the “Lipitor” prescription he filled on the Internet was laced with Chinese fakes. Your mother breaks her hip because the phony “Evista” medication she took for osteoporosis was nothing more than molded Chinese chalk. Your house gets robbed by a drug addict high on methamphetamines made from ephedra grass grown on Chinese state-run farms and transported to New York via Panama by Triad gangs.
2. You walk out of a Wal-Mart with a big smile and a large basket laden with cheap Chinese goods ranging from a fancy new laser printer and plasma TV to shirts, socks, and running shoes. Your smile quickly turns to a frown as your eyes begin to sting and lungs burn from the Asian “brown cloud” now visible on the horizon. It is 90-proof “Chinese chog” a particularly toxic atmospheric smog that has hitchhiked on the jet stream all the way from China’s industrial heartland where everything in your basket was first manufactured.
3. Your bank balance drops precipitously as rising interest rates drive your adjustable rate monthly mortgage payment off the charts and as you shell out more than you ever dreamed to fill your gas tank. Your mortgage payments are being held hostage to China’s currency-manipulation policies. You pay dearly at the pump because of the price-shocking effects of China’s rapidly rising thirst for oil.

The Coming China Wars is not just a story about how China’s emergence as the world’s “factory floor” is affecting you and your pocketbook.
The story is far larger than any one of us or any single country.
This book takes a tough, hard look at the eight major China Wars already well underway:

1. The Not-So-Swashbuckling Piracy Wars
Following a centuries-old tradition of skullduggery in the South China Seas, China has become the world’s largest pirate nation.
China’s modern buccaneers, with the strong support of their government, are not just stealing software and Hollywood movies on DVDs.
They are blatantly counterfeiting virtually the entire alphabet of goods from air conditioners, automobiles, and brake pads to razors, refrigerators, and the world’s most recognizable pharmaceuticals such as Lipitor, Norvasc, and Viagra.
In the process, these pirates are posing grave health risks to hundreds of millions of people. 
They are also destroying all semblance of global intellectual property law protections vitally needed to spur innovation.

2. The Twenty-First-Century Opium Wars
With an unholy triangle of Triad gangsters, international smugglers, and corrupt Communist Party officials as cartel kingpins, China has emerged as one of the world’s biggest dope dealers.
Most despicably, China is not just the world’s “factory floor” for legitimate goods but also for the so-called precursor chemicals used to produce all four of the world’s major hard drugs: cocaine, heroin, methamphetamine, and Ecstasy.
China has also retained its historical role as a major transit area for opium from the Golden Triangle, and it is rapidly emerging as a highly efficient production center for Ecstasy and speed.
Not coincidentally, Chinese criminal syndicates are awash in illicit cash, and China’s banking system is becoming an important hub for global money laundering.

3. The Air Pollution and Global Warming Wars
With claim to 16 of the world’s 20 dirtiest cities in the World Bank’s environmental Hall of Shame, China has been dubiously crowned as the most polluted nation on Earth.
As a result of its rapid industrialization and lax environmental controls, China’s prodigious toxic emissions are now spewing well beyond its environmentally porous borders.
Storms regularly rise up from China’s Inner Mongolian desert steppes and blanket Korea and Japan with tons upon tons of toxics-laden dust.
Chinese chog regularly hitchhikes along the jet stream, only to descend thousands of miles away in big cities such as Los Angeles and Vancouver and to despoil visibility in pristine towns such as Aspen.
With its belching coal plants and rapidly multiplying automobile fleet, China will soon eclipse the United States as the single largest contributor to global warming.

4. The “Blood for Oil” Wars
With its economy rocketing, China has emerged as the world’s second largest petroleum consumer behind only the United States.
Astonishingly, China now accounts for almost half the growth in global oil demand and is the primary catalyst for an oil market hurtling toward $100 a barrel.
To lock down its petroleum supplies and lock the rest of the world out China has adopted a reprehensible foreign policy based on Hu Jintao’s amoral mantra of “just business, no political conditions.”
It has shipped ballistic missiles and transferred nuclear weapons technologies to the radical Iranian regime, used its diplomatic veto in the United Nations to sanction genocide in the Sudan, and facilitated the looting of public treasuries by dictators in oil- and mineral-rich African countries from Angola to Zimbabwe.
This unconscionable blood for oil diplomacy has resulted in the slaughter of millions, the impoverishment of millions more, and a rapid spike in nuclear proliferation in both the Middle East and Asia.

5. The New Imperialist Wars
In a supreme historical irony, one of imperialism’s worst former victims has become the twenty-first century’s most relentlessly imperialistic nation.
From Brazil, Cuba, and Venezuela to Equatorial Guinea and the Ivory Coast, China dangles lavish, low-interest loans and sophisticated weapons systems as bait.
It then uses its “weapons of mass construction” a huge army of engineers and laborers to build everything from roads and dams to parliament buildings and palaces.
After these unwitting countries are driven ever deeper into China’s debt, China’s imperialistic quid pro quo is the rapid extraction of the country’s raw materials Bolivian tin, Chilean copper, Cuban nickel, Congolese cobalt, gold from Sierra Leone, Rwandan tungsten, and the vast mineral wealth of South Africa.
As the despotic puppets running China’s “new colonies” transfer billions in bribes to their Swiss bank accounts, the peasants these despots rule over slide ever deeper into poverty.

6. The Damnable Dam and Water Wars
China is the dam-happiest place on Earth.
With far too little water, far too much of that water horribly polluted, and the once-mighty Yellow River running dry for more than 200 days a year, China is facing a severe water crisis that already pits angry farmers against encroaching industrialists, millions of displaced “peasants with pitchforks” against corrupt government officials, and downstream versus upstream provinces.
This is also a fierce diplomatic battle being waged between upstream and downstream countries. Upstream, China is constructing a phalanx of mega-dams on the Mekong River despite the strong protests of the downstream countries of Cambodia, Laos, Thailand, and Vietnam.
These dams including one that will be more than 100 stories tall and the tallest in the world now threaten the food supply, transit routes, and livelihoods of more than 50 million people living in the Lower Mekong River Basin. 
Already, the Mekong has recorded its lowest levels ever and has flowed close to rock bottom near the end of its journey in Vietnam.
Precisely because of these many and varied economically driven conflicts, we and our children are destined to fight a complex and highly interrelated series of wars with China on many, many fronts. As you will see in the chapters that follow, a reckless and ruthless Chinese government is directly to blame for many of these Coming China Wars.
However, it is also disturbingly true that China’s hyper-growth is causing the world’s most populous nation to spin out of the control of its leaders.
As China’s economy continues to grow at unprecedented rates, the “strange bedfellow” combination of a totally unrestrained free market capitalism operating under a harshly repressive totalitarian umbrella is becoming more and more like a political and social Molotov cocktail rather than an exemplary economic model for the rest of the world.
That is precisely why the greatest danger to the world community may be China’s coming “wars from within.”
These wars from within may be triggered by any number of internal ticking economic and demographic time bombs that threaten to bring on that which the Chinese people fear most “chaos” or luan.

7. China’s Wars from Within
Over the past decade, the number of protests and riots in China has risen to nearly 100,000 annually. This is hardly surprising to any astute China watcher.
People are being pushed beyond tolerance as the Chinese countryside becomes a slave labor camp and dumping ground for every imaginable pollutant.
The rural peasantry is being sucked dry by wastrel government tax collectors.
Corrupt local government officials seize land on behalf of developers, pocket the monies that are supposed to compensate villagers, and then enlist local gangsters to quell protests.
In the big cities, unpaid construction workers leap to their deaths in protest of wages that go callously unpaid.
Meanwhile, on China’s Western prairies, ethnic separatist tensions continue to smolder over the ongoing “Hanification” of the mostly Muslim population on the Western frontier.

8. China’s Ticking Time Bombs
China is rapidly graying getting old faster than it is getting rich.
China is now facing a pension crisis that will make solving the unfunded social security liabilities of equally graying countries such as the United States, Japan, and Germany look like strolls through the park.
China is also a nation getting increasingly sick.
Environmental pollution serves as a deadly catalyst for an explosion of myriad cancers and an epidemic of respiratory and heart diseases.
This rapid rise in ill health is coming precisely when China’s once-vaunted public health-care system has totally unraveled.
Adding to these extreme pressures is an HIV/AIDS epidemic that may soon become the worst in the world.
This epidemic began with the most scurrilous HIV/AIDS blood donor scandal on the planet.
It is being rapidly fueled by rampant intravenous drug use, a late-blooming 1960s-style sexual revolution, and the explosive reemergence of China’s once-infamous flesh trade.
The radical remedies and reforms that will be required to avoid the chaos, casualties, and hardships of the Coming China Wars both within China and beyond its borders will never occur unless we gain a much better understanding of the basic economic forces driving these political, financial, social, energy, and environmental conflicts.
My abiding hope, particularly for the children, is that a better understanding of the complexities of the economic origins of the Coming China Wars will help lead to their peaceful resolution. Cultivating such an understanding and calling China and the rest of the world to action are the ultimate goals of this book.
The fictional News Release leading off this article is just one glimpse of a future that we all should urgently seek to avoid.

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.