US Sanctions More Chinese Over Fentanyl Precursors

The OFAC said the sanctioned Chinese firms and people were also involved in the global trafficking of xylazine and nitazenes, which are highly potent and often mixed with illicit fentanyl or other drugs.

Xylazine, or“tranq,” is a powerful sedative for veterinary use that is increasingly misused by narcotics traffickers who mix it with illicit fentanyl to produce a deadly mixture. Nitazenes vary in potency with some being considerably more potent than fentanyl, which is about 50 times more potent than heroin.

Among the sanctioned, Wang Shucheng and his successor, Du Changgen, led a Chinese illicit drugs syndicate that manufactured and distributed nitazenes, fentanyl, methamphetamine (or ice) and MDMA (or ecstasy) precursor chemicals.

Du owned five companies, including the Hong Kong-based Hubei Vast Chemical Co Ltd and Hebei Guanlang Biotechnology Co Ltd, and the China-based Hebei Xiuna Trading Co Ltd, Shanghai Jarred Industrial Co Ltd and Hanhong Pharmaceutical Technology Co Ltd.

Their suppliers, which sell fentanyl precursor chemicals and tablet compression machines, were also sanctioned.

The OFAC said the drugs syndicate had used virtual currency to settle their deals.

Many Chinese commentators criticize the US for causing its own drug problems.

“The US accounts for only 5% of the world's population but consumes 80% of the opioid drugs sold globally. It is a major drug-consuming nation,” Xinhua journalists Zhu Ruixin and Qiu Xia say in a commentary published on September 19.

“The fentanyl crisis was caused by different matters, including the United States's failure in regulating psychoactive drugs, collusion between politicians and drugmakers and poor counter-narcotics,” they say.“However, some US politicians are now trying to blame others, such as China.”

They say the US has seen three waves of opioid drug problems since 1991, including Purdue Pharma's OxyContin in the 1990s, heroin in the 2010s and fentanyl in recent years. They suspect that one reason for the failure of the US government to do well in counter-narcotics is that politicians had received donations from pharmaceutical firms.

They say China has taken the initiative to ban exports of fentanyl to the US since 2019 and also set up monitoring systems to prevent its chemicals from being used in making illicit drugs. They say it's unfair that the US has blamed China for exporting fentanyl precursor chemicals to Mexico without providing any information to China in advance.

In 2019, Celina Realuyo, a professor at the National Defense University, in an article described the fentanyl crisis as the“New Opium War,” referring back to a war between the United Kingdom and Qing dynasty China in 1839-42.

Chinese commentators say that, if this is the“New Opium War,” China will win this time.

“Whenever the US faces a drug problem, it blames China,” Liu Xiao and Mao Yufei, columnists of the Global People, a magazine of the People's Daily, say in an article published on September 20.“The US played this trick more than a century ago.”

They co-write that, from the 1870s, American physicians had prescribed opium-smoking to their patients, resulting in a broad use of the opium drugs in the following decades.

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They say, in order to pass a bill in the Congress to ban the import of opium in 1909, the US government blamed Chinese migrants for introducing opium-smoking to the country and linked the image of the drug-taking behavior with that of“Chinese, gamblers and prostitutes.”

A writer who uses the pen name“Beifengxuelin” says in a 2021 article that the US had made profits from opium trade in China in the 1800s and then used the money to transform itself into an industrial power over the past century. He says it's ridiculous that the US now criticizes China for supplying chemicals.

Even if China cuts its fentanyl-related exports, he says, the US will import them from India.

The opium poppy was introduced to China by Arab traders in the seventh century. Its pods, stems and seeds, which consist of morphine, can be brewed into a tea, which was described as a mild painkiller by Chinese herbalist Li Shizhen in the Compendium of Materia Medica in 1596.

In the 17th century, opium-smoking, which allows a lot more morphine consumption, was invented in Southeast Asia. In 1803, morphine, which is 10 times more potent than processed opium, was extracted. Now fentanyl is 100 times more potent than morphine.

In other words, fentanyl is 1,000 times stronger than the opium seen 180 years ago in terms of painkilling effect. As it can lead to the release of a lot more dopamine, or“pleasure hormone,” in a person's brain and body, it is also a more addictive drug.

Read: Fentanyl, Russia trade spark new Sino-US friction

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