On April 21, 2016 Prince—one of the biggest stars of the 1980s music scene—died of a massive overdose of fentanyl, at a far higher level in his blood stream than most fatal cases. It was reported that Prince had suffered from intense pain after years of touring in which his stage act involved pronounced physical exertions. Probably more likely to save his reputation, prosecutors announced that Prince likely did not know that the Vicodin he was obtaining without a subscription was laced with fentanyl. It is difficult to believe he didn’t know this, since he was obtaining it illegally and knew that this wasn't “normal” Vicodin, and knew that calling it “Vicodin” was just a way to give the drug the fig leaf of “legality.”
Eighty-five percent of all illegal fentanyl in the world is consumed in the U.S., and people know exactly what they are doing, and some have paid the price for it, such what happened to Prince. In an AP Science Insider story in 2017, we are told that a man named
Miller Atkinson was an addict from the very first time he shot up with heroin. "I fell in love with it. Everything else fell to the wayside," says the 24-year-old. "There was nothing that could have stopped me from getting high."
And that's what he did every day, for 9 months, in his family's upper middle class neighborhood in this Midwestern city. He dropped out of the University of Cincinnati. Like other users, he built up a tolerance to heroin and needed larger doses to find euphoria. Then, about 4 years ago, a powerful new combination hit the streets here: heroin cut with fentanyl, a synthetic opiate about 100 times more potent than morphine that's used to alleviate pain during and after surgery and in late-stage cancers. "It started trickling in, and we were like, ‘Wow, that was good, we need to get more of that,'" he says. "It was more intense."
For most illegal drugs, it is a crime to be either a seller and/or a user. But this country has chosen to label users of fentanyl, whether for "medicinal" or "recreation" use, as “victims.” Why? Because it has become part of the “border control” issue in which Mexicans can be further demonized. If it wasn’t for those “illegal’ Mexicans, poor “victimized” Americans wouldn’t be “dying.” This of course ignores this country's long history of violence in regard to illegal substances, especially during the Prohibition era when Mafia gangs battled each other over territorial rights to sell illegal liquor.
Wherever there is a market, there is a seller, and in the U.S. where people have a “libertarian”-level belief in the right to do anything they wish from shooting either with a gun or a needle, individuals must ultimately be held responsible for their own actions. People use fentanyl either as a painkiller—given its powerful ability to dull the nerves—or mixed in with “recreational” drugs to increase their potency. This is what people want, and for many, the question of “mortality” cuts both ways: they can either die with it, or in great pain without it. Most are willing to take a chance with the former in order to evade the latter.
But the quest to find a scapegoat in Mexico is one of the biggest political and law enforcement hypocrisies in this country. In a report released earlier this month from the Congressional Research Service, it was noted that fentanyl, a synthetic opioid, was first created in the U.S. in 1959. Because of its potency and potential for abuse, the United Nations put it on its controlled substance list in 1964, but the U.S. did not do this until 1970, so its been around a not insubstantial amount of time. Fentanyl seemingly can be consumed in combination with other substances in ways that can be left to the imagination, which makes it difficult to control.
But there is one thing that should have been controlled but was not: the very source of fentanyl and it chemical constituent parts. For China—a country where the government generally leaves Chinese crime syndicates to their own devices so long as they do not pose a threat to government authority or public stability—having a monopoly on fentanyl production was just another extraordinarily lucrative “trade.” I have posted this DEA graphic before, but here again we see how this “trade” flows first from China, then to India, Canada and of course Mexico.
Although there was a “deal” with the international community to stop the “legal” flow of “pure” fentanyl products from China in 2019 as well as money laundering schemes related to the trade, Chinese crime syndicates in illicit labs still manufacture the chemicals used to create fentanyl, and send them to third parties either in China or in other countries to create the “finished” product. According to the aforementioned report
To date, the PRC has not reported taking action to control additional fentanyl precursors, including 4-AP, boc-4-AP, and norfentanyl. Some PRC nationals indicted in the United States on fentanyl trafficking charges remain at large. With respect to financial crime, the U.S. State Department’s 2022 International Narcotics Control Strategy Report (INCSR) states that the PRC “does not cooperate sufficiently on financial investigations and does not provide adequate responses to requests for information.”
In Mexico it is not the cartels that oversee the production of fentanyl, but representatives of the Chinese syndicates who keep the “recipe” secrets to themselves, and who of course get their “cut” of the sales.
China, because it is a country where dissent is tightly controlled and has a government that does not feel it is accountable for its actions, thus is increasingly becoming a less trustworthy actor on the world stage. In the years it was looking the other way as the world—and the U.S. in particularly—was becoming addicted to Chinese-supplied fentanyl, the “morality” or “ethics” of what it was doing was of little consequence. In recent years, charges of human rights and territorial violations have caused the Chinese government to feel even less inclined to “cooperate” on stemming the flow of fentanyl. A 2020 NPR investigation found that
Chinese vendors have tapped into online networks to brazenly market fentanyl analogs and the precursor chemicals used to make fentanyl, and ship them directly to customers in the U.S. and Europe as well as to Mexican cartels…
…Some of the substances are outlawed in China and internationally. Others are so new they are not yet banned, are harder to detect and regulate, and they can be used in basic chemical processes to produce illegal drugs.
Chinese vendors are often camouflaged by a complex network of corporate entities registered in far-flung cities along China's interior, where they use sophisticated shipping methods to bypass screening measures and where law enforcement scrutiny is often laxer than in bigger cities such as Beijing or Shanghai. Thousands of doses can be shipped together in small, hidden packages.
"Many Chinese networks involved in the production and advertising of fentanyl quickly adapted to increased legal constraints by modifying their techniques to exploit loopholes in chemical restrictions and disguise their activities," said Michael Lohmuller, a C4ADS analyst and report co-author.
China, we have discovered, was content to stop a few highly publicized shipments and conduct a few prosecutions, and to “technically” ban Internet sales to demonstrate its “cooperation” with the world community to stop the scourge of fentanyl. But it expected something in return—mainly that other countries would not trouble China with complaints about its other illicit activities both domestic and foreign.
As the Brookings Institute reported this year, there is very little “visibility” into China’s enforcement of fentanyl regulations, and it is believed that this is because there is very little enforcement beyond defensive government claims when it charged that they are not doing enough. This graphic reveals the known "illicit" manufacturing sites of fentanyl or its chemical compounds inside China either singly or "hubs" with as many as four dozen labs—as if Chinese authorities don’t know this themselves:
In fact, as NPR reported, many drug “businesses” in China still see the trade in fentanyl as being de facto “sanctioned”:
"Our company [is a legal business] in China. We offer [discreet] and reliable packaging and delivery. Fast and reliable shipping within 48 hours, using courier service, DHL, EMS, TNT, FedEx, UPS," Gaosheng Biotechnology Co. Ltd. coached its sales associates to say on more than 100 social media and advertising sites, according to a company document seen by NPR. The company has advertised an array of drugs, including a popular fentanyl analog called furanyl fentanyl, according to C4ADS.
To mask the U.S.’ inability to control the behavior of China as the source of nearly all fentanyl and/or its compounds, scapegoating Mexico—whose drug cartels Chinese crime syndicates found a willing “partner” to help distribute it into the U.S.—is a convenient way to tell the American public that it has little control of the source. Today, DEA or media reports of fentanyl seizures almost never—or more correctly, never—mention China. Yet it is Chinese operatives who from the source down to the overseas manufacturing labs who are overseeing the process. It is just too easy to blame the Mexicans for “everything.”
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