Responding to China’s chemical warfare

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.

This is not an isolated case. The February 2022 report of the congressionally appointed Commission on Combating Synthetic Opioid Trafficking investigated 11 prominent website domains that were found to be selling fentanyl precursors. Every single one of these websites was either registered or hosted out of the People’s Republic of China. Those sites linked to 2,852 sellers of various fentanyl precursors, most, but not all, of which were Chinese biotechnology and pharmaceutical companies.

Chinese researchers at the People’s Public Security University of China acknowledged in June 2021 that “there are still many factories that … illegally produce and sell fentanyl substances, driven by high profits.” They also noted that several Chinese government bodies have not issued prosecution standards and sentencing guidelines for opioid-related crimes.

If the CCP took even a meager portion of the resources it devotes daily to scouring the Chinese internet and censoring grievances about COVID controls, it could eliminate all internet postings that advertise the sale of fentanyl precursors. Instead, Chinese embassies post statements deflecting blame for America’s fentanyl crisis, saying, “The fentanyl problem in the United States continues to worsen, and the number of deaths has increased instead of falling. The reasons for this are worth pondering.”

Indeed.

Even more insulting was the Chinese Communist Party’s declaration in August that it would cease counternarcotics cooperation with the United States over House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s trip to Taiwan. Not that the CCP was helping much in the first place, but now it has made manifestly clear its willingness to wield the supply of fentanyl precursors as a political cudgel. Considering the thousands of American deaths this could cause, we must treat such hostility with the same seriousness as if a terror group threatened to mail anthrax spores across our country.

So how do we stop this crisis?

Since the CCP will not help, we must take matters into our own hands through the aggressive use of sanctions and criminal prosecution tools. Our justice system should pursue criminal indictments and INTERPOL notices for the executives of the chemical and pharmaceutical companies pumping precursors across the world, as well as those who host e-commerce websites that permit these chemicals to be sold and shipped to our shores. In the interim, while criminal cases are built, Chinese offenders should be placed under the Treasury Department’s Kingpin sanctions against drug traffickers. Additionally, their children must not be allowed to study at our top universities or go on lavish shopping sprees in Los Angeles and New York. There must be an aggressive whole-of-government campaign to use every tool at our disposal to stop China from exporting these dangerous chemicals.

The Biden administration must stop treating fentanyl as some mere public health issue. Together, drug cartels and Chinese companies are slaughtering our children without mercy or remorse. A chemical war is being waged on American citizens. We must starve the cartels of funding and bring justice to our enemies.

CLICK HERE TO READ MORE FROM THE WASHINGTON EXAMINER’S CONFRONTING CHINA SERIES

Morgan D. Ortagus is the founder of Polaris National Security. She was the U.S. State Department Spokesperson from 2019-2021 and previously served in intelligence roles at the Treasury Department.

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