Thousands are dying from fentanyl overdoses each month — over 71,000 died last year. It’s time to call this what it is: chemical warfare. Drug cartels in Mexico manufacture and traffic their deadly wares across the border, with an unending supply of fentanyl precursors directly from China at their disposal. This crisis should have been at the top of the list of concerns when President Joe Biden recently met with Chinese President Xi Jinping. It didn’t garner a mention.

The Chinese Embassy in Washington recently defended itself by noting it put strict scheduling controls in 2018 on NPP and ANPP, the abbreviations for fentanyl’s chemical precursors that were recently added to the United Nations Commission on Narcotic Drugs list of controlled substances. To see how vigorously the Chinese government is controlling this substance, I went on the popular e-commerce website “made-in-china.com” and entered a simple search for “NPP.” The first result advertises pharmaceutical-grade NPP for export across the world, with packaging that can be “disguised as required.” A screenshot from the site demonstrated its products had been delivered by mail to buyers in Philadelphia, Georgia, and Indiana over one 4-hour period in October 2021.