Why Do We Let China Get Away with the Fentanyl Murders?
The death toll is real but the punishment of China is non-existent
If you have suffered a loss in America’s great war with drugs then you surely are asking why? Why can’t we stop the flow of drugs into the country? If you haven’t suffered a loss but are concerned about a problem that hasn’t touched you then you should ask why.
What I left out of the second sentence here was the word “yet.” “A problem that hasn’t touched you, yet.”
America is losing battles every day with drugs. The war is taking a devastating toll. The number one cause of death of Americans between the ages of 18 and 45 is fentanyl overdose.
Can you imagine? When I grew up, they told us that the beauty of our American life was that each generation lived better than the preceding one. This is no longer true.
Coincidentally or not — I opt for the “not” side of the coin — in the 43 years since Ronald Reagan launched his so-called revolution, we have seen our nation degrade into a state of affairs where half of the country wants a Christian fascist state and they don’t hide this fact; and, where drug overdose is more common than heart attacks, cancer, automobile accidents and every other cause of death. If we narrow that age cohort down to 5 to 17-year-olds, then the number killer is gun violence.
Drugs and guns, folks, sky-rocketing income inequality and fascism and this is all thanks to 43 years of the faux economic policy called “supply-side economics.” In a nutshell, the more you cut taxes on the wealthy, the better off the middle-class and working classes are because the increased wealth will be invested in more and better jobs which creates more revenue for the government (The Laffer Curve).
Well, that didn’t pan out that way, and voila, the most “exceptional” nation on the earth can’t keep its youngest and most important in terms of economic growth safe from drugs and guns.
Why? Because too few in Washington care even though many of them have also lost loved ones to drugs. Our president’s son is an addict with all of the baggage that a lifetime of drug abuse brings. So many of us can relate to the sorrows that Joe Biden experiences. Republicans dance around with glee over his suffering and this is part of the answer to our why. Why nothing gets done? Because too many find the drug horrors playing out in our streets as just too politically juicy to clean up.
If Republicans didn’t have the nightmare unfolding in places like Philadelphia, San Francisco, and so many other cities, what would they have then to beat Democrats?
The other “why,” in the puzzle of why we can’t solve this drug problem is because of China. The flow of drugs from the South of the border is real and has been going on forever. I don’t think that that supply route will ever be paved over but we can at least make it harder for them.
China’s guilt
China, however, is different. If China wanted to, it could either stop or greatly reduce the prevalence of illicit manufacturing of fentanyl in its country.
China, however, doesn’t want to because it sees no reason to stop the flow. China wants the U.S. to be weak. China also knows that Americans are gluttonous and can’t control themselves. If China lets fentanyl flow unrestricted to the Mexican cartels, then large swathes of our country will be turned into the Center City part of Philadelphia under the I-95 overpasses — it’s an outdoor drug market and Philly’s largest free hostel.
China subordinates its counternarcotics work to its geostrategic relations. If relations between the U.S. and China are warm, the flow of fentanyl slows. When things are bad, like now, like under Trump, China does nothing.
In April 2022, China suspended all cooperation with U.S. counternarcotic officials. China fights furiously to keep drug addiction low in its country and also in Southeast Asia and is fairly successful. China doesn’t want neighboring countries to become drug destinations — the U.S., however, being one is perfectly acceptable because it destroys American communities and keeps the drugs flowing to far-off ports.
China’s reluctance to tighten controls on chemical production and exports has spurred a clash with U.S. legislators.
“China’s critically involved in the 64,000 deaths we had because they are pretty much the lone supplier of [fentanyl] precursor chemicals and pre-precursor chemicals, which they are shipping to Mexico,” said Rep. David Trone (D-Md.), the commission’s co-chair (The War on Drugs).
Mexican cartels rely on the flow of illicit fentanyl from China. After receiving their very reliable shipments which are undoubtedly enriching many a Chinese Communist Party member, the fentanyl process is processed into synthetic opioid fentanyl which then ends up killing American citizens. The Chinese government knows what is happening, when, where, and most likely by whom and yet does as little as possible; and, most recently, nothing. It is just too good of a problem for the U.S.
“They know it’s being shipped to Mexico, it’s being done by Chinese middlemen who are selling it directly to the Mexican cartels where it is being turned into fentanyl, which is then being mixed into other drugs like counterfeit pills [including] Oxycontin, Xanax, Valium [and] Adderall,” Trone added. “[It] is coming into the U.S. by the hundreds of millions of pills and the chain all starts in China (The War on Drugs).”
While it may seem to be an exaggeration to call this chemical warfare, I don’t care. My brother died in 2017 from heroin mixed with fentanyl. He overdosed the summer before he died from a similar mix and claimed he didn’t know that it had fentanyl. He told us that he only ever bought from the same guy who was adamantly against fentanyl. That same guy sold him the deadly mix five months later.
Did he know, or, as some suspect, was he simply unaware of what he was selling? Many dealers claim that they don’t know about the fentanyl. It’s of course hard to believe a dealer but there would be some logic. If all of your customers overdose, then you lose money. Could the increased doses of the mystery ingredient, fentanyl, be part of a Chinese plan?
I know this sounds border-line Fox News-meets-the-Republican-Party conspiracy theory but when you search for answers to the inevitable why that drifts through your head each day after losing a loved one, anything becomes plausible — and, you want to blame someone for your loss besides maybe yourself or your loved one.
China, of course, denies that any of the fentanyl made in its factories feeds America’s drug problem. As we know, China, like Russia, lies about everything. Nothing that China ever tells us can be taken at face value. Everything China says has to be assumed to be a lie and then it is necessary to ask why they are lying.
Why is China lying? Why does a country that so easily locked down nearly a billion people during COVID only have a handful of agents to inspect the 5,000 manufacturers of pharmaceuticals? In 2019, China inspected 15 of those 5,000 factories.
But is cutting the supply of drugs the best tact? Seattle has found that working with addicts has had more impact on lowering addiction in the city than limiting supply. With demand decreasing, the city has seen a drop in its notoriously large army of street-living drug-addicted.
Public health experts say that a focus on reducing the supply of synthetic opioids is a losing proposition borne out by the U.S. government’s failed 50-year war on drugs. The U.S. approach to the opioid overdose crisis should hinge on reducing demand and providing harm reduction strategies for people who use drugs, said Ethan Nadelmann, founder of the nonprofit Drug Policy Alliance and host of the “Psychoactive” podcast(The War on Drugs).
The Chinese government agrees too that going after the supply is not a good strategy. China agrees because China can never admit that it might have done something wrong. The COVID epidemic in China became a pandemic because of China’s deceitful ways. The world still isn’t right after COVID — thank you, China.
I happen to agree that demand has to be decreased but I also feel that if China’s leaders, and here I mean Xi Jinping, was to become a partner with us and stopped his incessant sniveling and whining about every imagined affront, the dual-headed strategy might actually slow the rate of death in our nation today.
At least 70,000 Americans between the ages of 18 and 49 will die this year because of overdose. Getting China involved could drop that to 60,000 and then maybe over time, 50,000 — you see where I am going with this.
We have to do something and if we won’t then at least let’s punish China.
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