Fentanyl: China killing Americans with impunity

FPI / October 27, 2020

The communist regime in China is killing Americans with fentanyl, an analyst noted.

Gordon Chang related in an Oct. 21 analysis for Gatestone Institute just how destructive the drug is in the U.S.

"At the end of 2017, a friend in Maryland's Anne Arundel County stood outside a church in Severna Park. There, he watched teenage girls and boys, all dressed in black, walk down the front steps of the local funeral home, the girls all in tears, hanging onto each other, and the boys, staring blankly away. Then came the parents, still in shock," Chang wrote.

Chang's friend said: "You know and I know what it was. Somebody was burying their child and somebody else — somebody in China — was counting money."

Americans "are under attack," Chang wrote. "The attackers are from China, their sword is fentanyl, and deaths are the result of maliciousness in the Chinese capital."

Chang said his friend recently left this message: "There are a few old heroin addicts, but I don't know of any old fentanyl addicts."

Tucker Carlson noted on his Oct. 16 Fox News broadcast: "I'm not alleging any kind of conspiracy, I suppose, but just the plain facts of it: fentanyl and covid both came from China, China's our main rival, they're benefiting from the deaths of many thousands of Americans."

The communist regime in China "is indeed killing Americans with fentanyl," Chang noted. "It is doing so deliberately. Carlson was right to suggest intentionality."

There were a record 70,980 overdose deaths in the U.S. last year, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). Of those deaths, 36,500, were from synthetic opioids such as fentanyl. Cocaine and methamphetamine fatalities were also up, largely because these substances were mixed with fentanyl.

There is no doubt where fentanyl comes from.

"Since 2013, China has been the principal source of the fentanyl flooding the U.S. illicit drug market — or of the precursor agents from which fentanyl is produced, often in Mexico," reports Vanda Felbab-Brown of the Brookings Institution.

In April 2019, at the behest of the Trump administration, China announced a ban on the production, sale, and export of fentanyl-class substances without authorization.

But analysts have pointed out that the new rules are hard to administer.

"The enforcement challenge," the Brookings report said, "is formidable since China's pharmaceutical and chemical industries involve tens of thousands of firms and hundreds of thousands of facilities, and China lacks adequate inspection and monitoring capacity."

The implication that criminal gangs can operate in the shadows in China "is highly debatable," Chang noted. "For one thing, the Communist Party, through its cells, controls every business of any consequence."

"Moreover," Chang added, "the Chinese central government operates what is undoubtedly the world's most sophisticated set of social controls. Using big data and artificial intelligence, tens of thousands of government watchers surveil 1.4 billion people with approximately 626 million surveillance cameras and tens of millions of neighborhood monitors and Communist Party cadres. Beijing tightly controls the banking system and knows of money transfers instantaneously."

Fentanyl cannot leave China undetected, Chang noted, "as virtually all shipped items are examined before departing Chinese soil."

Jonathan Bass, CEO of importer PTM Images, told Gatestone that authorities inspect and seal every container leaving China. Fentanyl is often sent to the U.S. by mail, which means the Chinese state, through the National Postal Service of China, is the distributor.

U.S. Customs and Border Protection, based on data from its Operation Mega Flex "blitz" inspections, learned that 13 percent of packages from China contain some form of contraband, including fentanyl and other deadly substances.

"China's postal service has to know that it has become, among other things, the world's busiest drug mule," Chang wrote.

The communist regime "will stop at nothing to increase the relative power of their regime," Chang noted, adding that supreme leader Xi Jinping's regime "is using criminality as an instrument of state policy."

Xi's regime, Chang noted, "has adopted the doctrine of 'Unrestricted Warfare', explained in a 1999 book of the same name by Qiao Liang and Wang Xiangsui. The thesis of the authors, both Chinese Air Force colonels, is that China should not be bound by any rules or agreements in its attempt to take down the United States."

"The combination of China's relentless desire to increase its relative strength and the belief that no tactic is out of bounds means Beijing sees fentanyl as a weapon," Chang wrote.

Free Press International