hina and Synthetic Drugs Control: Fentanyl, methamphetamines, and precursors
Synthetic opioids remain the source of the deadliest U.S. drug epidemic ever. Since 1999, drug overdoses have killed approximately 1 million Americans,[1] an overdose lethality that has increased significantly since 2012 when synthetic opioids from China began supplying the U.S. demand for illicit opioids. Even though China placed the entire class of fentanyl-type drugs and two key fentanyl precursors under a controlled regulatory regime in May 2019, it remains the principal (if indirect) source of U.S. fentanyl. Fentanyl scheduling and China’s adoption of stricter mail monitoring has created some deterrence effects. Instead of finished fentanyl being shipped directly to the United States, most smuggling now takes place via Mexico. Mexican criminal groups source fentanyl precursors — and increasingly pre-precursors — from China, and then traffic finished fentanyl from Mexico to the United States. Scheduling of fentanyl and its precursors in China is not sufficient to stem flows to the United States.
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There is little visibility into China’s enforcement of its fentanyl regulations, but it clearly remains limited. U.S.-China counternarcotics cooperation remains fraught, and from the U.S. perspective inadequate. Rejecting U.S. blame of China for the opioid epidemic and emphasizing U.S. responsibilities for that calamity, Beijing points to its benevolence in anti-drug cooperation. But China’s cooperation with the U.S. in the global counternarcotics campaign has been subordinated to the overall deteriorated geostrategic relationship between the two superpowers. There is little prospect that in the absence of significant warming of the overall U.S.-China bilateral relationship, China would significantly intensify its anti-drug cooperation with the United States. U.S. punitive measures, such as sanctions and drug indictments, are unlikely to change that. Structural characteristics of synthetic drugs, including the ease of developing similar, but not scheduled synthetic drugs and their new precursors — increasingly a wide array of dual-use chemicals — pose immense structural obstacles to controlling supply, irrespective of political will to prohibit and regulate their use and enforce the regulations.
New York: Brennan Center for Justice, 2022. 84p.