WHAT HAS THE US DONE TO CRACK DOWN?
Former president Joe Biden’s administration made the fight against fentanyl a priority.
In October 2023, it slapped sanctions on over two dozen China-based entities and individuals alleged to be the “source of supply” for many US-based narcotics traffickers, dark web vendors, virtual currency money launderers and Mexican cartels.
The group, which included a Wuhan-based company and a number of other firms based in Hong Kong and the mainland, was alleged to be responsible for the shipment of approximately 900kg of “seized fentanyl and methamphetamine precursors” shipped to the United States and Mexico.
“The global fentanyl supply chain, which ends with the deaths of Americans, often starts with chemical companies in China,” the then US attorney general Merrick Garland said last year.
China condemned the investigation at the time as part of a US campaign of “pressure and sanctions” against it.
WHAT HAVE THE US AND CHINA AGREED TO?
China-US talks on drug control stalled in the face of some of their worst relations in years.
But following a summit between Biden and Chinese President Xi Jinping in San Francisco in November 2023, Washington and Beijing agreed to restart talks.
Last summer, a counternarcotics working group convened in Washington and China announced it would step up its regulation of three key fentanyl precursors.
But it remains to be seen whether the latest curbs will fully stop the cross-border traffickers – who the Justice Department said “adapt to tightening restrictions”.
Analysts say that manufacturers are able to develop new variants of the synthetic precursors faster than they can be identified and added to scheduled lists of substances controlled by Chinese authorities.
Vanda Felbab-Brown, an expert on organised crime at the Brookings Institution, had said Beijing needs to take a tougher line against domestic firms involved in the trade.
“We are nowhere close to robust indictments, robust prosecutions in either the money laundering sector or smuggling of precursors to the Mexican cartels,” she said in a podcast.
