Members of Congress are urging Secretary of State Antony Blinken to pressure China to do more to curb the flow of fentanyl and synthetic opioids into the United States on his visit to the country which is expected to take place in the next few days.
On Wednesday, a group of 14 Republican senators led by Marco Rubio of Florida wrote to Blinken ahead of his trip highlighting China’s role in the “fentanyl crisis” as one of many issues they wanted him to address.
More than 100,000 Americans died of drug overdoses from July of 2021 to July of 2022 and two thirds of those deaths were fueled by synthetic opioids, primarily fentanyl, according to the CDC.
An extremely powerful synthetic drug, fentanyl is 50 to 100 times more potent than morphine and 30 to 50 times more potent than heroin.
The Chinese government cracked down on the manufacture and distribution of fentanyl in 2019, in a move that was hailed by the Trump administration. As a result, China it is no longer the primary source of fentanyl getting into the US. But it’s still the key source of precursor chemicals which are often shipped to Mexico and used by cartels to produce fentanyl which is brought over the border.
“China is the leading producer of these precursor chemicals and is shipping and selling them to the two major Mexican cartels (Sinaloa and New Generation) producing fentanyl,” explained David Luckey, a senior international and defense researcher at RAND Corporation.
“Virtually 98% of the precursor chemicals that are made used to make fentanyl are coming from China,” Democratic Rep. David Trone of Maryland told CNN. Getting China to engage on this crisis “has got to be Secretary Blinken’s number one mission when he gets there.”
Experts and lawmakers say the production of precursor chemicals in China is a primary factor fueling the ongoing…
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