China’s Role in Fentanyl Crisis Back in Spotlight as Tariffs Loom

When President-elect Donald Trump announced a hike in his tariff plans for China, as well as U.S. trade partners Canada and Mexico, he drew attention to China’s involvement in the illicit fentanyl crisis in the United States.

The day one plan would add 10 percent duty on top of the tariffs Trump already has planned for Chinese products, and a 25 percent tariff on all products coming in through Canada and Mexico.

Over the past two administrations, including Trump’s first term, Beijing has made a number of promises to help curb the movement of illicit fentanyl but kept few of them.

Fentanyl is an FDA-approved synthetic opioid used to treat severe pain, such as in open-heart surgery, or epidurals for mothers in labor.

Illicit fentanyl, however, is often mixed with other drugs, and illicit drug makers are increasingly producing analogs, or drugs similar to fentanyl, with small molecular changes that can make the drug up to 100 times more deadly.

Fentanyl is already a potent drug—2 milligrams is enough to be a lethal dose depending on a person’s size.

Steve Yates, a China expert and former national security official in the George W. Bush administration, has made recommendations to Trump advisers on fentanyl policy. He and others say sanctions on Chinese banks for backing money launderers and chemical sellers will accomplish what diplomacy to date has not.

“When you don’t do those things, then you’re a doormat,” Yates told Reuters.

David Asher, a top former U.S. anti-money laundering official who helped target the finances of the Islamic State terrorist group, said this mechanism has been used against designated foreign adversaries like Iran but never Mexican or Canadian banks.

“You need to hit all the bankers. It’s sort of basic,” said Asher, who has recommended criminal indictments against Chinese and Mexican financial institutions, bounties on traffickers, and other measures.

Trump, who had campaigned on stopping the opioid crisis, formed a commission to combat the issue in March 2017 and declared a public health emergency in October that year.

Experts and officials have determined that precursor chemicals—which can be hard to ban if they have benign, legal applications—are shipped from China to Mexico, where local labs finish the process to create illicit fentanyl and analogs.

Former DEA official Derek Maltz told The Epoch Times that tariffs only address one aspect of a vast and complex problem, but they certainly help and, more importantly, signal that the incoming administration will show strong leadership on the issue.

“We have to be more aggressive to get [Beijing] to cooperate more than they have in the past,” he told The Epoch Times.

Maltz is the former special agent in charge of the Special Operations Division of the Justice Department and former chief of the New York Drug Enforcement Task Force, the nation’s oldest and largest of its kind.

Maltz, who has tracked the opioid crisis since 2008, has seen the need for interagency cooperation to treat the issue as one of national strategic importance because it is no longer just a “drug issue.”

He said the United States needs a comprehensive plan to repair the damage done, including a defense strategy, mental illness treatment, rehabilitation, and much more.

“It’s not just a supply issue,” Maltz said. “You can’t just throw money at it and expect it to go away.”

The easily editable nature of the drug also means that Chinese pharmaceutical manufacturers’ efforts far outpace regulators, officials say, with the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime estimating that there could be potentially thousands of synthetic fentanyl analogs.

Fentanyl-related deaths again rose steeply in 2020, with experts warning that a prolonged drug crisis could follow the mental health crisis caused in part by extended COVID-19 pandemic lockdowns.

Then, in 2022, the CCP stopped cooperating entirely, stating it was in response to then-House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s (D-Calif.) visit to Taiwan.

The United States took additional unilateral steps in the meantime, sanctioning dozens of Chinese nationals and companies for exporting illicit fentanyl and related drugs. In September 2023, President Joe Biden put China on the U.S. list of major illicit drug transit or producing countries.

Talks between Washington and Beijing resumed in November 2023. Xi agreed to resume counternarcotics cooperation in exchange for the Chinese Ministry of Public Security’s Institute of Foreign Science, which was implicated in human rights abuses in Xinjiang, being taken off the U.S. sanctions list.

Chinese regime spokespersons have, over the years, repeatedly rejected U.S. reports that name China as the primary source of illicit fentanyl, saying instead the cause of the drug problem is the United States.

Chinese manufacturers and suppliers aren’t stopping at fentanyl either, Maltz said. They’ve realized that the United States doesn’t strictly regulate marijuana production, he said, and are increasingly investing in the marijuana market.

Reuters contributed to this report.