Behind the deadly opioid epidemic ravaging communities across the United States lies a carefully planned strategy by a hostile foreign power that experts describe as a “form of chemical warfare.”
It involves the production and trafficking of fentanyl, a synthetic opioid that caused the deaths of more than 32,000 Americans in 2018 alone, and fentanyl-related substances.
China is the “largest source” of illicit fentanyl in the United States, a November 2018 report by the U.S.-China Economic and Security Review Commission stated. That same commission said that since its 2017 report, they found no “substantive curtailment” of fentanyl flows from China to the United States. They also noted that in “large part, these flows persist due to weak regulations governing pharmaceutical and chemical production in China.”
President Donald Trump has continued to increase his crackdown on fentanyl—he recently ordered all U.S. carriers to “search for and refuse” international mail deliveries of the synthetic opioid pain reliever. Trump specifically named FedEx, Amazon, UPS, and the U.S. Postal Service (USPS).
Jeff Nyquist, an author and researcher of Chinese and Russian strategy, said China is using fentanyl as a “very effective tool.”
“You could call it a form of chemical warfare,” Nyquist told The Epoch Times. “It opens up a number of opportunities for the penetration of the country, both in terms of laundering money and in terms of blackmail against those who participate in the trade and become corrupt like law enforcement, intelligence, and government officials.”
China also uses the money generated by the importing of fentanyl to effectively “influence political parties,” according to Nyquist.
“It opens doors for Chinese influence operations, Chinese People’s Liberation Army, and intelligence services, so that they can get control of certain parts of the U.S.,” he said.
In August, Trump called out Chinese leader Xi Jinping, accusing him of not doing enough to stop the flow of fentanyl, which enters the United States mostly via international mail.
Liu Yuejin, vice commissioner of the China National Narcotics Control Commission, disputed Trump’s criticism, telling reporters on Sept. 3 that they had started going after illicit fentanyl production, according to state-controlled media. China also denies that most of the illicit fentanyl entering the United States originates in China.
“President Xi said this would stop—it didn’t,” Trump said on Twitter on Aug. 23.
Overdose deaths from synthetic opioids such as fentanyl surged from around 29,000 in 2017 to more than 32,000 in 2018, according to data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC).
Not all opioid-related deaths in the United States can be blamed on China’s fentanyl export policies, as some come from prescription overdoses, according to Dr. Robert J. Bunker, an adjunct research professor at the U.S. Army War College Strategic Studies Institute.
But Bunker told The Epoch Times that China is still “greatly contributing” to America’s opioid epidemic. Bunker described how Beijing is using the trafficking of dangerous drugs to achieve its greater Communist Party goals.
“Contributing to a major health crisis in the U.S., while simultaneously profiting from it would in my mind give long-term CCP plans to establish an authoritarian Chinese global system as a challenge to Western liberal democracy,” he said via email.
“[It’s] a win-win situation for the regime,” he continued. “In fact producing and sending fentanyl to the U.S., which could be considered a low-risk policy of ‘drug warfare,’ is very much in line with the means and methods advocated in the 1999 work ‘Unrestricted Warfare.’”
The book mentioned by Bunker is authored by two of China’s air force colonels, Qiao Liang, and Wang Xiangsui, and published by the People’s Liberation Army.
Recent cases of fentanyl-related overdose and deaths are linked to “illegally made fentanyl,” the CDC has said. Fentanyl has been approved for treating severe pain for conditions such as late-stage cancer. Fentanyl is 50 times more potent than heroin and 100 times more potent than morphine. It is prescribed by doctors through transdermal patches or lozenges.
A USPS spokesman told The Epoch Times they are “aggressively working” to add in provisions from the STOP Act. The Synthetics Trafficking and Overdose Prevention legislation, signed in 2018 by Trump, aims to curb the flow of opioids sent through the mail while increasing coordination between USPS and the U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP).
USPS has notified China’s postal operations that if any of their shipments don’t contain Advance Electronic Data (AED), they “may be returned at any time,” the spokesman said via email. CBP is also notifying air and ocean carriers to confirm that 100 percent of their postal shipment containers have AED before loading them onto their conveyance.
Recent Seizures
In August, law enforcement seized 30 kilograms (around 66 pounds) of fentanyl, among other narcotics as part of a major arrest operation over the course of three days. As a result, officers arrested 35 suspects for “conspiracy to distribute and possess with intent to distribute large amounts of heroin, fentanyl, cocaine, and cocaine base.”
G. Zachary Terwilliger, U.S. Attorney for the Eastern District of Virginia, said in a statement that the amount of fentanyl seized was enough to “kill over 14 million people.” One of the suspects in Virginia had ordered the fentanyl from a vendor in Shanghai and was receiving it at his residence through USPS, according to the indictment.
“The last thing we want is for the U.S. Postal Service to become the nation’s largest drug dealer, and there are people way above my pay grade working on that, but absolutely, it’s about putting pressure on the Chinese,” Terwilliger said.
CBP Enforcement Statistics reveal that fiscal year seizures of illicit fentanyl spiked from about one kilogram (2.2 pounds) in 2013 to nearly 1,000 kilograms (2,200 pounds) in 2018. The number of law enforcement fentanyl seizures in the United States also vaulted from about 1,000 in 2013 to more than 59,000 in 2017.
Also, in August, the Mexican navy found 52,000 pounds of fentanyl powder in a container from a Danish ship that was coming from Shanghai. The navy intercepted the unloaded 40-foot container on Aug. 24, at the Port of Cardenas.
“There is clear evidence that fentanyl or fentanyl precursors, chemicals used to make fentanyl is coming from China,” Dr. Andrew Kolodny, co-director of Opioid Policy Research at the Heller School for Social Policy and Management, told The Epoch Times.
Two commonly used fentanyl precursors are chemicals called NPP and 4-ANPP. In early 2017, journalist Ben Westhoff started researching the chemicals, finding many advertisements for them all over the internet from different companies. He later determined a majority of those companies were under a Chinese chemical company called Yuancheng, according to an excerpt from his upcoming book “Fentanyl, Inc.: How Rogue Chemists Are Creating the Deadliest Wave of the Opioid Epidemic,” an excerpt of which was published in The Atlantic.
Fentanyl Analogs
One of the concerns related to the production of illicit opioids is the creation of fentanyl analogs, products that are similar to fentanyl and also simple to make.
“You can very easily manipulate the molecule and create a new fentanyl-like product that hasn’t been banned, that’s not technically illegal,” Kolodny told The Epoch Times. “Some of the manufacturers, the folks creating the drugs, are aware of that.”
“We saw this with other synthetic drugs that are abused in the U.S., when law enforcement make the drug illegal or when they ban the molecule,” he said. “In some cases, fentanyl analogs are even stronger than fentanyl. There’s an analog called carfentanil, which is even more potent than fentanyl.”
Carfentanil has a quantitative potency “approximately 10,000 times that of morphine and 100 times that of fentanyl,” according to the National Center for Biotechnology Information.
Just one microgram is needed for carfentanil to affect a human. The drug is “one of the most potent opioids known” and is marketed under the trade name Wildnil “as a general anesthetic agent for large animals.”
“Sometimes, it’s hard for law enforcement to keep up with the chemist,” Kolodny added.
A bill dubbed the SOFA Act or the “Stopping Overdoses of Fentanyl Analogues Act,” has yet to pass Congress. The act was introduced in May by Republican senators and would give law enforcement “enhanced tools to combat the opioid epidemic and close a loophole in current law that makes it difficult to prosecute crimes involving some synthetic opioids.”
Kolodny said pharmaceutical industries have been lobbying to stop any legislation meant to restrict fentanyl analogs “because these are products they are trying to bring to market.”
In August, an Oklahoma judge ordered Johnson & Johnson to pay $572.1 million to the state for deceitfully marketing addictive opioids. The sum was less than what investors had expected, according to Reuters, which resulted in shares of the multinational corporation rising in value.
“We should be doing everything we can to keep fentanyl out of the country,” Kolodny said. “We should be doing everything we can to ban fentanyl analogs.”
Billion-Dollar Grants
As part of the Trump administration’s latest efforts to combat the opioid crisis, the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) on Sept. 4 announced nearly $2 billion in funding to states.
The funding would expand access to treatment and also support near-real-time data on the drug overdose crisis, according to a release.
In announcing the move, White House counsel Kellyanne Conway told reporters in a conference call that their administration is trying to interject the word “fentanyl” into the “everyday lexicon” as part of their efforts to increase awareness.
Data suggests that of the approximately 2 million Americans suffering from opioid use disorder, approximately 1.27 million of them are now receiving medication-assisted treatment, according to the HHS.
“Central to our effort to stop the flood of fentanyl and other illicit drugs is our unprecedented support for law enforcement and their interdiction efforts,” she said.
Conway then brought up the DHS seizures of fentanyl in 2018, which totaled an equivalent of 1.2 billion lethal doses.
“Ladies and gentlemen, that is enough to have killed every American four times,” she told reporters.
Just weeks ago, the White House released a series of private-sector advisories aimed to help businesses protect themselves and their supply chains from inadvertently trafficking fentanyl and synthetic opioids.
The four advisories aim to stem the production and sale of illicit fentanyl, fentanyl analogs, and other synthetic opioids. The advisories focus on the manufacturing, marketing, movement, and monetary aspects of illicit fentanyl.
In March 2018, the Interior Department created a task force aimed to specifically combat the crisis on tribal lands. Since then, the department has arrested more than 422 individuals and seized 4,000 pounds of illegal drugs worth $12 million on the street, including more than 35,000 fentanyl pills.
Conway, on the conference call, described the epidemic of pain relievers as an “opioid and fentanyl crisis.”
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Just say no. Everyone says no other things. Is there anyone who hasn’t heard that the stuff is poison?
heroin? Hasn’t everyone figured out its addicting and a bad idea?
weeding out dirty junkies is doing US a favor, if that’s their idea of warfare then they’re missing the point
Payback for the opium wars??
Exactly. It seems they learn from history instead of being taught gender confusion in school.
China had the world’s largest economy before the 1st Opium War. The British used Opium to wreck them and they didn’t really recover until very recently.
You guys are both correct, this is their payback to the west, for the Opium war, the British did the same thing to them, when ships were wind powered.
The dragon see’s all round eyes as the same, just like we see all the squints the same way.
Integration and diversity is a disaster, you don’t see any Asian countries accepting hoards of “rapefugees” no no, that is something designed and planned by western Oligarchs,
to crush the homogeneous Caucasian societies, making them easier to control and loot.
So I should be angry at the Chinese for creating a substance for potential Darwin Award winners who hate life?
Not my circus, not my monkeys.
They’re simply supplying a market for people who have nothing to live for. I’ve heard of EMTs and cops who’ve used multiple doses of Narcan on people and got assaulted for it. In NJ pharmacies were supplying Narcan for public use. I doubt it was the zombified chronic drug users who bought the Narcan because it was aimed at family, relatives, and concerned SJW types.
what an idiotic thing to say, it is your circus, you just can’t see the forest for the trees.
when a foreign country pollutes your country with toxins, you stick your head in the sand and say it’s not your problem?
Good thing to know about you.
I’m not the one sticking needles in my fucking veins – the real idiots are the ones doing that and it’s not my responsibility to fix them. Second of all the world’s single largest producer of raw opium is Afghanistan, enabled and protected by the US armed forces, so kiss my ass.
The real problem with fentanyl is how very toxic it is. Minute amounts can kill and it can be dumped into drinking water and other substances to create a massive die off before anyone knows what’s happened.
https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/k-9-dogs-overdose-fentanyl-drug-killed-prince-n687611
When you put it like that, you make it sound like a bad thing.
when a foreign country pollutes your country with toxins, you stick your head in the sand and say it’s not your problem?
“While fentanyl is synthetic, it is synthesized from the opium poppy, which is why opioids all have similar effects and characteristics.”
https://www.therecoveryvillage.com/fentanyl-addiction/related-topics/what-is-fentanyl-made-of/
https://www.zerohedge.com/news/2019-09-03/helmand-province-drug-lab-global-scale
I agree with him. If you’re a drug addict and you die from Fentanyl Good. You won your prize. Now rinse and repeat a few million times to get rid of the rest of the dead weight. We should be thankful Fentanyl is taking out the trash we don’t have the heart to take out, ourselves. Now, if we could just get the cops and paramedics to stop trying to save these people, we would be on the right track.
We should thank the benevolent Chinese Communists for thinking so much of us they would help us with our Useless Eater problem.
Why use a five letter culprit, when three letters work.
Carry on.
I went to Vietnam in 2002 with my gf and her native Vietnamese mother. We stopped in Taiwan for a plane change. In the concourse in ginormous letters there was sign saying trafficking in drugs is a capital offense. I imagine mainland China is similar, like Malaysia.
On Monday I am having a minor surgical procedure. Early skin cancer, squamous, quarter sized and growing on my big toe. I may lose my toenail but unlikely to lose a toe. The point being I saw them this week for a different issue and requested a script for pain medicine, hydrocodone 5/325 so I would not have to hobble into the pharmacy post surgery. The doc said yes. And he said he was going to check “the list”.
I quit writing scripts in 2008. I wrote ’em for 38 years. Wisdom teeth, root canals, multiple extractions – up to 20 in one sitting and the junkie’s favorite; for, “I have a toothache” – on Friday night- meaning I want some drugs for the weekend. It was always more common on nice Spring day weekends. Nowadays it is routine to refer them to the ER and let them sort them out. But back in the day we were kinda obligated to treat patients who availed upon us, personally. If the after hours story was good enough, I could call in some antibiotics and some Percocets or Lortabs/Lorcets. Maybe a dozen at most. Real addicts wanted Percodans as they can be melted in a spoon and injected. Or they wanted Meperidine or Demerol. A sure sign is when they would claim they were allergic to codeine.
The con stories were sometimes quite creative. And to make it more difficult to judge ethical prescribing, if a person does have a opiate dependency, one would ethically be required to give them a higher dose for post surgical and infection pain relief. Paradoxical but is how the thinking goes. Yeah, treat the dependency but after the acute situation.
So my dermatologist went online to see if I had any previous Rx’s for opiates. He wanted to see my drivers license. He told me it is a new system started in the last year of so. He said he could tell if I have had any Rx’s in neighboring states and Federal healthcare facilities. I came back clean. And the new paper Rx pads now have check like security features built in. Many scams have been committed with copy machines and forged signatures on generic Rx pads.
Three cheers I say. Yes some loss of privacy issues but gotta police the abuse somehow. The idea is to minimize prescriber enabling of users and spot abusers. I would guess over prescribers would be subject to judgement.
But the Sacklers will skate the fate of accountability.
Let’s be honest for a moment. Fentanyl (called “China White” back in the 80s and 90s), is NOT purchased directly by users. It is mixed into heroin by drug dealers. Were this a fully legal marketplace and were we to have a government that respected the rights of self-ownership (rather than considering all of us THEIR property), users, addicts, and others, would most likely purchase their drug of choice, including heroin, from reputable businesses in their community (pharmacies used to be the point of sale for heroin, morphine, cocaine, and most other drugs before the 1930s). These businesses would NOT contaminate their heroin, etc. with extremely dangerous drugs like fentanyl, because they would not wish to face the lawsuits or criminal charges that would come from adulterating their products, killing people, falsely labeling their products, etc. Customers would be able to purchase a defined quantity of product, with a known/verified/certified purity and composition, and deaths from accidental overdoses would be extremely rare. But we do NOT have a government that believes in self-ownership. They tell us what we can and cannot put into our bodies (even MUST in the case of vaccines). They tell us where we can spend the fruits of our labor, what we are allowed to spend that on, how much fruit we may retain for our own use, etc.
I am not saying that fentanyl is a good drug. It is used in fentanyl “lollipops” for children to relax them before MRIs, CAT scans, etc. It is a powerful pain killer, and it is 40 times stronger than heroin. Likely it is being brought into the US at very low cost to dealers, and a small amount goes a long way for making less than good quality heroin, seem better than it really is. Heroin dealers have been known to “cut” their drugs with milk powder, talcum powder, and even portland cement (talk about getting stoned). But this is INEVITABLY what one can predict will happen when the GOVERNMENT destroys freedom with prohibition.
The answer to the problem is FREEDOM, not more government. 100 years of drug war failure, and every other failure of government policies, should make that 100% clear by now.
Utopia? No. But better than the current tyranny, and everything else the war on drugs is used to “justify” – civil asset forfeiture, destruction of banking secrecy, hundreds of billions of dollars of wasted cost, and so much more.
Culling our “best and brightest”, huh?
How long until someone decides to dump some of this shit into a water supply to major city? 51,517 pounds of this shit is enough to kill over 11 billion people.
https://www.breitbart.com/border/2019/08/25/25-tons-of-fentanyl-from-china-seized-in-mexico/
You know, China may have already gotten a good dose of what they deserve if this fentanyl from there is one of their weapons of war. My question is this: where was Hog #1 when it introduced that pig pestilence to their country? Supposedly they’ve killed half of their 400 million hogs and may have to kill all of them. If that genie was brewed in a CDC Lab, then how long will it be when all of their chickens and ducks start dying? If all of their chickens, ducks, and hogs were to die it won’t register here but it sure would over there. That would be a new twist to the old saying that life is a bitch and then you die.
I think it’s kinda funny that the U.S.A. has its biggest hog herd since 1943.
The PRC is a totalitarian regime. Nothing is being manufactured or exported without at least tacit approval of the Central Committee.
Let me get this straight- China is flooding our country with an evil, deadly drug that can kill you in as little as a single touch and it’s laying waste to the drug addicts?
What’s the problem?
That’s a solution if you ask me. We should be flooding our streets with more of the stuff. Get more Fentanyl and put it in free dispensers all up and down the streets of LA and San Fran and DC, etc. And ban Narkan overdose injectors.
Not only that; imaging the immense savings we would have in our mediscam system and welfare as we rid ourselves of excess human debris?
Fentanyl is a blessing- leave it alone.
Plenty comes from the good old USA:
They could add it to McDonalds and dub it, “THE UNSTOPPABLE BURGER! nobody can eat just one!“
Behind the illegal drug trade encouraged by the huge profits to be made by traffickers there is an even larger profit for those in government employ . Law enforcement , for profit prisons , judicially mandated treatment centers all bleeding the taxpayers forced to fund benefit packages allowing government employees to retire in there mid 50’s while the “War on Drugs Rages on”!
What a crock of shit feed to us by government . Take the profit out of it offer it free all of it . Those who die from a lethal dose were on that road the first time they stuck a needle in their arm any way !
First responders still go to overdose calls lights and siren but at a slower cautious speed because it is generally a repeat performance by some junky .
Again take the profit out of it cut law enforcement budgets and start a free drug give away .
Some LEO’s will discover what jobs are really waiting for them in this bull shit booming economy and we retired people pushing 70 can get a real tax cut
Over 32,000 people dead in the last year from that drug. Out of 360 million thats really not a lot. So its no bother. But hey the less than 229 that died by gunmen in mass murders since 1776 well now thats a fuckin problem and we should ban all guns. Confiscation should ensure. Yep. Surely should.