WHAT HAS THE US DONE TO CRACK DOWN?
Former president Joe Biden’s administration made the battle in opposition to fentanyl a precedence.
In October 2023, it slapped sanctions on over two dozen China-based entities and people alleged to be the “supply of provide” for a lot of US-based narcotics traffickers, darkish internet distributors, digital foreign money cash launderers and Mexican cartels.
The group, which included a Wuhan-based firm and a variety of different companies based mostly in Hong Kong and the mainland, was alleged to be chargeable for the cargo of roughly 900kg of “seized fentanyl and methamphetamine precursors” shipped to america and Mexico.
“The worldwide fentanyl provide chain, which ends with the deaths of Individuals, usually begins with chemical firms in China,” the then US lawyer normal Merrick Garland mentioned final yr.
China condemned the investigation on the time as a part of a US marketing campaign of “stress and sanctions” in opposition to it.
WHAT HAVE THE US AND CHINA AGREED TO?
China-US talks on drug management stalled within the face of a few of their worst relations in years.
However following a summit between Biden and Chinese language President Xi Jinping in San Francisco in November 2023, Washington and Beijing agreed to restart talks.
Final summer time, a counternarcotics working group convened in Washington and China introduced it will step up its regulation of three key fentanyl precursors.
However it stays to be seen whether or not the most recent curbs will totally cease the cross-border traffickers – who the Justice Division mentioned “adapt to tightening restrictions”.
Analysts say that producers are in a position to develop new variants of the artificial precursors quicker than they are often recognized and added to scheduled lists of drugs managed by Chinese language authorities.
Vanda Felbab-Brown, an skilled on organised crime on the Brookings Establishment, had mentioned Beijing must take a more durable line in opposition to home companies concerned within the commerce.
“We’re nowhere near strong indictments, strong prosecutions in both the cash laundering sector or smuggling of precursors to the Mexican cartels,” she mentioned in a podcast.
