Though many in the United States would like to place blame on China for the continued fentanyl epidemic here, they should be looking much closer to home for the cause of the problem. For starters, it is the Wall Street and City of London financial interests that run the drug trade, fentanyl included, from the top, as EIR documented in its bestseller Dope, Inc.: Britain’s Opium War against the World, first published in 1978, and has proven time and time again since then. Secondly, recent China-U.S. anti-drug cooperation has been destroyed by Washington’s policy of attacking and containing China. A Dec. 22 article in the Wall Street Journal highlighted some of the particulars of this second aspect—but of course doesn’t dare touch the first point.
In 2017, the U.S. and China reached an agreement to work together to stop fentanyl and precursor drug trafficking. As a result of China’s class scheduling of fentanyl in May 2019, trafficking of fentanyl from China into the United States plummeted: in 2017, some 128 kilos of China-originated fentanyl were seized; in 2020, that had dropped to one-half kilo.There was also an agreement to work closely with U.S. authorities to limit the sale of precursor chemicals involved in fentanyl production. These largely went to Mexico, but some go to Canada as well, where the drug is then produced and trafficked into America. A landmark case occurred at the time, in which U.S.-China collaboration succeeded in finding and prosecuting a fentanyl export ring run by Liu Yong. There was a publicly celebrated success and big press conference after the prosecution went through. In 2018, as a result of efforts by the United States in tracing the fentanyl supply chains, China put strong restrictions on two key fentanyl ingredients, as well as 25 fentanyl analogues (substantially similar but chemically different drugs), leading to high praise from the United States. Nonetheless, China said at the time that despite the agreement, “the relevant work is yet to be started.”
However, due to increasing attacks on China from America, these advances began to slow and then stop entirely. In 2020 the U.S. had blacklisted a Chinese police institute over alleged human rights abuses in Xinjiang. China was angered, and asked the United States to unblock them in exchange for further anti-narcotics cooperation. The United States refused. Then, after Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s visit to Taiwan on Aug. 2-3, 2022, China broke off all cooperation in the anti-fentanyl work. U.S. officials have tried to get China to cooperate again, but to no avail. “As a matter of fact, it is the U.S. that has undermined China-U.S. counter-narcotics cooperation,” said Liu Pengyu, a spokesman for China’s Embassy in Washington. Global Times wrote back in August that “it’s daydreaming for the U.S. to expect and demand China to continue cooperation on issues of U.S.’ concerns while it infringes on China’s core interests.”
