Biden’s Fentanyl Deal With China Failed to Stop Overdoses

Last November, Biden met with China’s Xi and the two leaders reached an agreement to tackle the fentanyl crisis fed by the traffic in precursor chemicals from the Communist dictatorship.

Three months later, the bodies are everywhere.

Fentanyl overdoses rose fourfold in Marin County in just 2 weeks, Oregon has the largest overdose rates in the nation and even children under 5 are dying of it in Tennessee.

And there’s no sign that the carnage is slowing down. 66 people died of drug overdoses in San Francisco in just the month of January. The majority of those deaths were fentanyl related.

Biden claimed after the meeting with Xi that China is “taking steps to shut down companies dealing in illicit trade and precursor chemicals.”

But officially what China did was send out warning letters to the firms shipping precursor chemicals to the cartels. Rather than warning Chinese companies that they faced action from their own government, the letters cautioned them that they faced legal action from America.

The companies making the poison killing Americans then had every reason to laugh it off.

Chinese firms were told to be “cautious about orders from the United States and Mexico and be wary of the exported items being used to manufacture drugs.”

Telling companies to be cautious and wary, is a long way from a crackdown.

In sharp contrast to the warning letters, earlier that same year Chinese authorities had raided the offices of American companies auditing local firms on behalf of U.S. investors.

Televised footage all over Chinese media showed blue uniformed thugs breaking into offices, carrying away boxes of files and manhandling employees. The regime was sending a message and it did so in the usual unsubtle way that Communist governments always operate.

The People’s Republic of China was far more interested in cracking down on American firms detecting fraud in China’s Potemkin village economy than on the drug rings and firms that bribe local officials to be able to continue murdering hundreds of thousands of American citizens.

China has spent far more time cracking down on tech firms than it has on drug precursor dealers. And, like the crackdown on auditors, it has done so publicly and prominently.

By contrast, China’s response to the fentanyl crisis has been to sweep it under the table.

In 2019, Chinese officials claimed that all the issues had been “resolved” after a handful of members of one smuggling network were convicted. Fentanyl was finally treated as a controlled substance. Some of the most blatant online pitches for drug sales were toned down. And hundreds of thousands of Americans still went on to die of fentanyl because none of this substantively stopped the manufacture and traffic in precursor chemicals out of China.

Now once again, Chinese authorities are sending out warning letters to companies and telling them that the government is keeping an eye on them. But smaller companies, which exist only on paper, just swap out old names for new ones and keep right on killing Americans.

Beijing had pulled this same scam in 2019 only for the fentanyl crisis to grow worse.

Even as Biden administration officials claim that the Chinese crackdown is working, it’s easy to find Chinese manufacturers still pushing precursor chemicals through Whatsapp messages.

Biden administration officials keep claiming that every meeting with Chinese officials moves things forward, but the Chinese officials tend to have a different story. In February,

Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas met with Public Security Minister Wang Xiaohong in Vienna. Biden officials claimed that progress had been made on battling fentanyl while Chinese media claimed that the focus was on letting Chinese students enter America.

Fentanyl is profitable for Communist China both economically and politically. The mass deaths of Americans provide Beijing with leverage on everything from tariffs to visas to Taiwan.

Lenin had once reportedly bragged that the capitalists would sell him the rope with which he would hang them. Americans are buying the fentanyl rope with which China is hanging us. Every shipment puts more money into China’s pockets while undermining America. And when American leaders ask China for help, they offer some limited cooperation, hold meetings at which they issue their own demands and then the regime which runs slave labor camps and conducted forced abortions claims that there are legal obstacles in the way of a crackdown.

The official line is that the marketplace is just too complicated for China to crack down on. The same regime which relentlessly monitors every aspect of life, especially economic activity and contact with foreigners, claims to be helpless to stop a major form of international trade.

Chinese authorities are aware of which precursor chemicals can be used for the drug trade, where they are manufactured and then shipped. And if these were being used to kill their own citizens, the crackdown would have been immediate, ruthless and thoroughly comprehensive.

But the Biden administration has been more than happy to accept the myth of Chinese helplessness. Rather than seriously taking on China, Biden’s 2022 National Drug Control Strategy focused on working together with the Communist regime “on shared drug priorities”.

But Beijing has very different drug priorities than we do.

The Biden administration keeps holding out for empty promises. A White House adviser claimed that her boss believes the China deal has “the potential to make a real difference in the lives of Americans”. The potential is there but only if Biden really gets serious about pressuring China.

And he isn’t.

Beijing understands that American politicians have short attention spans and want some sort of photo op that allows them to claim that they’re handling the problem. And the Communist regime is occasionally willing to play the game and go through the ritual of meetings and form letters even while the underlying problem not only continues, but gets even worse.

In response to past pressure, China rerouted the fentanyl pipeline away from direct sales and toward cartel middlemen. The deals cut profits for Chinese dealers but maintained the core priority of harming Americans. The regime will similarly allow domestic manufacturers to play musical chairs with chemicals as they and their partners develop new even deadlier drugs.

Plausible deniability allows Xi and Biden to pretend that they’re tackling the fentanyl crisis, but both men have more to gain than to lose from the epidemic. The drug trade is lucrative for China and the suffering from the fentanyl epidemic feeds the welfare state that serves as a core organizing and campaign mechanism for the Democratic Party. It’s a win-win situation.

And a lose-lose situation for millions of Americans.

42% of American adults in one survey said that they knew someone who had died of a drug overdose. Our communities are filling up with the casualties of a drug war that China is winning.

Daniel Greenfield is a Shillman Journalism Fellow at the David Horowitz Freedom Center. This article previously appeared at the Center's Front Page Magazine.

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