No one wakes up one day and says to him or herself that today is the day I’ll become a drug addict – society pushes people, in some cases high disposable wealth creates a sense of boredom from which the stimulus of recreational drugs is a form of escape, in others it’s peer pressure, we see others doing it, they encourage us to try and off we go down a slippery slope.
In others, it’s a sheer sense of desperation, if you’ve lived all your life in a society where homelessness is constantly a month away, where there are anxieties about where your next meal is coming from, or where sleeping in a cold doorway or under a windy bridge is your only option then taking something to escape that desperation is a way out. If this is true, then society needs to change, not laws, and definitely there don’t need to be fingers pointing out to blame others.
China is accused of supplying the means to facilitate this escape, but, rightfully, denies doing so. It’s now gone one step further and issued a white paper on how it’s controlling fentanyl, the cheapest and potentially the most dangerous “recreational”, if that’s the correct word, drug in the world. However, China doesn’t have a drug problem, there are very few drug addicts, there are no freely available drugs on the streets. That’s not to say there aren’t any drugs in China, of course there are, they’re just very hard to find.
And here’s a really interesting statistic that Americans will never see in their media: Of all the drugs caught in China, 92% of them were created outside China’s borders, with 99% coming from Thailand, Myanmar and Laos, the area known as the “Golden Triangle”. The other 1% that was intercepted was all marijuana, coming through the postal system. Read that carefully, it says that of all the drugs police intercepted in China, only 8% were made in China.
Many Americans would argue that’s because they’re all exported, but they’d be wrong, very wrong. According to the white paper, since 2017 only three criminal cases of trafficking fentanyl-related medications have been concluded in China, and no cases of outbound smuggling and trafficking of fentanyl-related medications have been detected.
Again, critics will say that China isn’t trying hard enough and, once again, they’d be dead wrong.
China has worked extensively with the US Drug Enforcement Agency, even to the point of setting up DEA offices in both Guangdong and Shanghai. Unfortunately, those offices were closed as a result of the countermeasures China imposed because of Nancy Pelosi’s ill-fated, ill-advised and, quite frankly, stupidly provocative visit to Taiwan. But notwithstanding that, there’s a lot more. Just as far as the US is concerned, as a result of the minor thaw when Presidents Xi and Biden met in the US, there was a reset and since then, on 30 January 2024, the China-US Counternarcotics Working Group held its first meeting in Beijing to identify priorities for counternarcotics co-operation.
The two countries have since convened multiple high-level meetings to promote bilateral dialogue and co-operation in drug control and law enforcement. On 31 July 2024, an inter-departmental Chinese delegation visited the US to attend the first senior official meeting of the China-US Counternarcotics Working Group. Again, we didn’t see anything about this in Western media.
We weren’t informed either that China’s Ministry of Public Security maintains daily hotline communication and holds regular exchange meetings with the DEA, the US Department of Homeland Security’s Homeland Security Investigations, and other drug control agencies? How much more information is Western media keeping from us?
Further, China has signed 50 inter-governmental and inter-departmental documents on drug control cooperation with more than 30 countries and unions of countries, established annual meeting mechanisms with 13 countries, and joined multilateral drug control cooperation mechanisms within the Greater Mekong Subregion, the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation, and BRICS.
So, when there are that many inter-governmental associations going on, it’s hard to tell lies about what they’re doing. What is easy, though, is for Western media and wilfully ignorant politicians to deflect blame and make unsubstantiated allegations. We can now see how badly Western media and those ill-informed politicians are manipulating their consumers and constituents into believing China is the bad guy here.
China has some drug issues, according to Statista, they make up 0.8% of the population, that’s a problem for any country, but particularly one with a huge population because it means the number is high, it’s about a million people. But, when the CPC took control of the country, the number was more than 70 million and they fixed that problem with societal change and by either rehabilitation for volunteers, or hard labour for people who didn’t seek voluntary rehabilitation – this way, the number of drug-addicted Chinese people dropped from 70 million to zero between 1949 and 1952.
One country accounts for more than 70% of all deaths from fentanyl and yet it points at another country many miles away where there’s no problem. Since the 1950s, China has had zero tolerance for all drugs and while there are people who are critical of this, especially those who consider marijuana to be a harmless recreational drug, they should take note of the historical reasons – we don’t have to agree with it, but we ought to understand the history behind it.
Internally, China has established a digital tracking system for fentanyl-related medications. There is comprehensive use of new technologies and methods, such as radio frequency identification tags, the internet of things, and artificial intelligence. There is also a whole-process dynamic monitoring and closed-loop management of the manufacturing, sale, transport, use, import, and export of fentanyl-related medications, which further prevents them from becoming untraceable. So, if anyone in China is producing illicitly, they are doing so in places they haven’t yet been found but there’s even more that China is doing to try and prevent this.
A wastewater testing method has been developed for detecting traces of six fentanyl-related substances and 65 other drugs, as well as their metabolites, achieving a detection limit of one part per trillion, or one nanogram per litre and domestic wastewater monitoring networks covering nearly 5000 wastewater treatment plants in 365 cities as well as a biomonitoring network covering high-risk groups. Since 2020, more than 60,000 domestic wastewater samples and more than 150,000 hair samples have been tested and analysed through these networks. There is also increased co-ordination across departments including cyberspace, public security, and industry and information technology.
In terms of transportation logistics; there is additional security screening through machines, with targeted measures for strengthening the detection and seizure of drugs. Customs authorities have reinforced risk assessment and port supervision and they have devoted targeted efforts to prevent the smuggling of fentanyl-related substances through intensified inspections of high-risk cargo and articles.
And remember, with all these measure in place, since 2017, only three fentanyl-related convictions have taken place – obviously this is not a Chinese problem.
It’s highly unlikely that US claims of products being used to kill Americans are being made in or shipped from China, but anyone producing these illegal substances will get caught and, when they are caught, China has a zero tolerance attitude towards drugs, including fentanyl-related substances. It’s likely that anyone in China producing fentanyl-related products will face the death penalty.
Once again, it’s been up to China to tell the truth about what’s happening in the world and, not for the first time, it’s China helping to fix the US’ problems.
As the White Paper suggests and quoting from its conclusion: “We should dig into the deep-rooted causes of the abuse of synthetic drugs represented by fentanyl, and promote the resolution of fundamental issues.” When China says we, it means U. As in US.
The views expressed are solely those of the author and may or may not reflect those of Pearls and Irritations.
Jerry Grey is a former British Police officer who was a general manager in a multi-national security company based in Australia for 17 years. He has lived, worked, travelled extensively and studied in China for almost two decades. He holds a Master Degree in cross cultural change management. Jerry Grey is a freelance writer living in Southern China’s Guangdong province.