China’s Expanding Illicit Drug Networks Raise Challenges For US Policy

Authored by Andrew Thornebrooke via The Epoch Times (emphasis ours),

President Joe Biden signed a proclamation in August commemorating Overdose Awareness Week, a solemn moment for a nation that has witnessed more than half a million deaths from drug overdose in the last decade.

The president hailed his administration’s “re-launch of counternarcotics cooperation” with communist China as a vital tool in combating the flow of fentanyl and other synthetic opioids into the United States.

It was partly this cooperation on counternarcotics that White House national security adviser Jake Sullivan then traveled to China to support.

For three days, Sullivan met with top officials from the Chinese Communist Party (CCP), before telling reporters in Beijing that the administration is dedicated to getting Chinese assistance over synthetic opioids.

“We’re going to look for further progress on counternarcotics and reducing the flow of illicit synthetic drugs into the United States,” Sullivan said on Aug. 29.

As Sullivan was preparing to leave Beijing, however, another senior Biden administration official was delivering a different message 5,000 miles to the southeast.

Deputy Secretary of State Kurt Campbell was in the island nation of Vanuatu, promising locals that the United States would crack down on the growing networks of Chinese drug traffickers.

Those networks, he said, were positioning themselves to increase the flow of fentanyl into the United States and elsewhere by expanding new shipping lanes throughout the Indo-Pacific.

“We are concerned some of the networks that have grown in China and South East Asia are beginning to use the Pacific for transshipment both to Latin America and the United States,” he said.

Campbell reassured those present that the United States would work with foreign nations to rein in drug trafficking by criminal networks from China. But his admission of a growing Chinese drug trade raises questions as to the efficacy of the Biden administration’s counternarcotics engagements with China.

Tackling Chinese Drug Flows

It is between these two priorities, managing diplomatic relations with China’s authoritarian regime and putting an end to the United States’s opioid crisis, that U.S. government officials now frequently find themselves.

A State Department spokesperson told The Epoch Times that the administration “remains concerned” about transnational criminal activity in the Indo-Pacific, and is working closely with “robust” assistance to regional partners on the issue.

“These transnational criminal groups, by definition, are global in nature and so must be our response,” the spokesperson said.

The spokesperson said that the administration’s diplomatic efforts had “driven positive steps” by the CCP to counter the flow of precursor chemicals used in the production of synthetic opioids, such as fentanyl.

Those diplomatic efforts consisted of two meetings of the Counternarcotics Working Group with China, a joint effort designed “to disrupt the manufacture and flow of illicit synthetic drugs.” They were unveiled after President Joe Biden met CCP leader Xi Jinping in California last year.

An Aug. 1 meeting of the working group succeeded in convincing China to schedule seven chemicals, including three fentanyl precursors, as controlled substances—a move the White House described as “an important step in the right direction.”

What remains unclear is whether these legalistic successes will result in any decrease in the amount of Chinese drugs that are currently flooding the United States and other nations.

The State Department spokesperson said that China-based companies remained “the largest source of precursor chemicals used to manufacture illicit fentanyl that affects the United States.”

Beyond scheduling drugs, the spokesperson noted that Chinese authorities arrested one individual earlier this year in relation to U.S. charges brought in 2023.

It remains the only known arrest made by China as a result of the bilateral counternarcotics coordination with the United States.

The lack of concrete deliverables from bilateral cooperation has raised concerns among some security experts that the CCP is merely making changes on paper which will not lead to any increased enforcement of drug trafficking laws.

In an analysis of the issue published in late August, researchers at the Australian Strategic Policy Institute think tank described China’s move to schedule chemicals as “a public-relations stunt to save face and obfuscate the party’s complicity in this deadly problem.”

The researchers added that the CCP did not simply appear to ignore the export of illegal drugs from China but supported it.

“In leaked documents, companies [that sold fentanyl] boasted that the CCP owned them and that their illicit products were tax-exempt,” the researchers said.

Fentanyl by the Numbers

More than 75,000 Americans died from synthetic opioid overdose last year, according to official U.S. data. At the same time, U.S. law enforcement seized more than 115 million fentanyl pills throughout 2023, according to a press release by the National Institute on Drug Abuse.

That’s more than 10 times the amount seized in 2021, and nearly 400 times the amount seized in 2018.

It’s too early to say if that trend will continue through 2024, but initial counts do not suggest the outlook is any less grim.

The Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) has seized 4,600 pounds of fentanyl powder and 34.5 million fentanyl pills in 2024 alone, according to the department’s website. The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) has seized more than 27,000 pounds of fentanyl, according to a fact sheet.

U.S. Customs and Border Protection Commissioner Troy Miller said in an interview with the agency’s in-house media in May that “100 percent pure fentanyl coming directly from China” was the primary threat facing the United States from 2014–2018.

After the United States convinced China to schedule fentanyl as a class of drugs in 2019, however, the flow of the drug shifted from direct exports from China and began to be smuggled into the United States via Mexican cartels using Chinese precursor chemicals.

Whether the Chinese drug companies’ transition to the Indo-Pacific marks a similar shift in strategy remains an open question, but the role of Chinese traffickers and money launderers in cartel business is growing.

In July, the DOJ