China’s fentanyl connection: the suppliers fuelling America’s opioid epidemic
- A Post Magazine investigation traces back to China supply lines of chemicals used by cartels to produce the opioid
- Under Chinese law, many sellers of fentanyl-precursor chemicals are not committing criminal acts
On December 2, 2020, a reporter posing as a Mexican buyer received the following text message from a man in China calling himself Mr Chen: “I think you know the product you need 125541-22-2, 79099-07-3, 103-63-9, 40064-34-4 is very sensitive in Mexico, it is easier to pass China customs, but not easy to pass Mexico customs, so even if you confirmed that you really need to book such goods, your company should also consider using our trading company to sign contracts with you, and change the name of the goods to pass Mexico customs, most of our customers in Mexico require us to change the name to pass the Mexico customs.”
Drug overdose deaths in the United States reached an all-time high of nearly 72,000 in 2019, and all signs point to a higher total in 2020 after a midyear tally showed a 13 per cent increase over the year before.
Fentanyl-related overdose deaths also registered a new high in 2019, at more than 37,000. Arming bar staff with a revival drug called naloxone and training them in the use of branded resuscitation medications such as the nasal spray Narcan is now standard protocol in the North American service industry.
The vast majority of these “precursor” chemicals used in the creation of fentanyl, commonly assigned Chemical Abstracts Service (CAS) numbers such as 40064-34-4 – useful for purposes both legal and otherwise – are a product of China’s massive and poorly regulated chemical industry. Despite supply chain disruptions during China’s Covid-19 lockdown early last year, the availability of synthetic opioids appears to be rising again, as Mexican cartels invest heavily in manufacturing fentanyl using precursors provided by Chinese chemical companies. This is big business for all concerned.
US Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) spokesman Michael Miller says it would be difficult to assess the cost of producing a single pill. Before the Chinese government cracked down on the practice, necessitating a cat-and-mouse approach to precursor production, he says, “traffickers could typically purchase a kilogram of fentanyl powder for a few thousand dollars from a Chinese supplier, transform it into hundreds of thousands of pills, and sell the counterfeit pills for millions of dollars in profit. If a particular batch has 2 milligrams of fentanyl per pill, approximately 500,000 counterfeit pills can be manufactured from 1 kilogram of pure fentanyl”.
