We can’t rely on China to stop the fentanyl crisis

“China,” Secretary of State Antony Blinken said in Beijing last month, “is providing information to international law enforcement that can be used to track and intercept illicit drugs and their precursors, and our two governments recently agreed to share best practices on closing loopholes in our financial systems that the drug traffickers and other criminal enterprises use to launder money.”

Sounds nice. But it doesn’t mean much.

China has cooperated with the United States before on the illegal drug trade, and on fentanyl in particular. The problem is that, like with climate change, China’s commitment to drug interdiction is wholly subordinate to its global geopolitical ambitions. If China is unhappy with U.S. policy on, say, Taiwan, it can and has stopped all fentanyl cooperation on a dime, as it did after then-Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) visited the island nation in 2022.

And the results of China’s indifference (at best) to the fentanyl trade has been a disaster for America. On an average day, fentanyl currently kills about 200 Americans. While these deaths usually don’t make news individually, that is the equivalent of a Boeing 737 full of passengers crashing and killing everyone aboard every day.

In fact, fentanyl has become the leading cause of death for adults between the ages of 18 and 45, and it has orphaned more than 2 million children. It is also inflicting more than $1 trillion in economic harm every year. If a global adversary wanted to cook up a covert weapon to destroy our nation, it would look a lot like fentanyl.

Before 2019, most fentanyl consumed in the United States was manufactured in China and then shipped to the United States, often through the mail. In 2019, China agreed to ban fentanyl, but not the precursor chemicals required to make it. Now most fentanyl consumed in the United States starts out as chemicals in China that are then shipped to drug cartels in Mexico, who then complete the manufacturing process and smuggle the finished drug into the United States. These Chinese shipments often include instructions in Spanish on how to finish the fentanyl making process.

Not only is China not cracking down on the business these Chinese drug companies are doing with Mexican drug cartels, according to a report released by the House Select Committee on the Chinese Communist Party, but the Chinese Communist Party directly subsidizes the production and export of these fentanyl precursors through tax rebates. Some companies have even been given direct cash grants to manufacture these chemicals, and the CCP even has outright ownership stakes in others. 

President Joe Biden has taken some solid steps to fight the fentanyl trade, but he has placed too much trust in Chinese cooperation. Biden’s executive order 14059, for example, directed the treasury secretary to place sanctions on all individuals and organizations involved in the fentanyl trade. Congress should go a step further, codify Biden’s executive order into law, and identify the CCP as an entity that participates and profits from the fentanyl trade — because they do.

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Congress should also fund and direct the Department of Homeland Security and the Department of Defense to interdict ships traveling from China to Mexico suspected to have fentanyl precursors on them. Such interdictions will not make China happy, but the embarrassment of exposing their role in the international drug trade may shame them into taking harsher action on their domestic producers.

The safety and well-being of Americans is too important to leave to the whims of the Chinese communist regime. Biden, and the next president, must be prepared to defend our citizens from the dangers of fentanyl without help from Chinese law enforcement.