China is starting to make good on its pledge to disrupt the global supply chain fueling the opioid crisis , shutting down some sellers of precursor chemicals used to make fentanyl and drafting new regulations for three other chemicals.
The move is part of a thaw in counternarcotics work between the United States and China.
Despite tensions between the two countries, President Joe Biden and Chinese President Xi Jinping agreed last year to cooperate on a plan to choke off fentanyl production as well as an overall crackdown on illegal drug trafficking.
Chinese police, acting on U.S. intelligence, recently arrested a 27-year-old man named Tong Peiji, alleged to be involved in money laundering for the Sinaloa cartel in Mexico.
"We are seeing some meaningful steps," a senior Biden administration told the Wall Street Journal. "There is a lot more to do. But we are encouraged particularly by the actions of the last couple of weeks."
More than 107,000 people in the U.S. died in 2023 of drug overdoses, of which around 75,000 died from synthetic opioids such as fentanyl, a drug that is 100 times more potent than morphine. The overdose fatality count in the U.S. is still about double what it was in 2015.
The drug crisis, with footprints in every state in the country, is a major concern and an election problem. The Midwestern swing states are among those that have been hit the hardest.
In recent months, senior U.S. officials have traveled to China. Last month, Dr. Rahul Gupta, the White House’s director of National Drug Control Policy, said China and the U.S. had agreed to establish a direct line of communication on threats from new synthetic substances.
The U.S. has complained that private companies in China are among the top producers of the chemical building blocks to make fentanyl.
In response, China has cracked down on some of these companies, leading to the closure of 14 digital sales platforms and the removal of 1,000 online stores. Critics claim the quiet closure isn't sending as powerful of a punch as it should to Beijing's chemicals industry and that the shutdowns should have come with very public arrests.
China also has some concerns with the U.S., accusing it of acting in bad faith by framing Beijing as the root cause of the global drug crisis.
Specifically, China is upset that the U.S. placed it on a "blacklist of major drug-producing countries for the first time, alongside the likes of Mexico and Colombia," the outlet reported.
“We think it’s absurd and ridiculous,” Wei Xiaojun, the head of the Ministry of Public Security’s Narcotics Control Bureau, said at a June press conference.
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A Biden administration official countered that China was making a fuss over nothing and said the country wasn't included in a smaller list of the worst-offending countries.
Despite the baby steps being taken on the drug front, there is concern that the frosty relationship between the U.S. and China over other matters, including Taiwan and aggression in the South China Sea, could derail any real progress.
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