China’s global drug trade is deadly and growing

China’s Global Drug Trade Is Deadly and Growing
The world today
iallan.drupal
August 15, 2024

A massive industry in the chemicals that make up synthetic drugs has expanded in China, flooding the global market. As a deadly health crisis looms, Danny Vincent speaks to those on both sides of the front lines.

Behind a computer screen in the northern Chinese city of Shijiazhuang, Dina sends out emails promoting new products to her global customer list. She uses a VPN to bypass the government firewall and updates her multiple social media accounts with photos of white powder and precursor chemicals. Her profile picture looks like an AI-generated selfie. Each message is punctuated with smiley-face emojis.

“All my prices are factory prices. I can give you a discount if you order in large quantities. I have many professional chemical researchers. I have many companies and factories. I have my own transportation route and I can send it safely,” she wrote when I posed as a customer and sent pictures of substances in plastic bags on scales. (I hasten to add that I did not buy anything.)

Dina, not her real name, is an online drug trafficker who works as a sales representative for an illegal pharmaceutical company in China. The company, and many others like it, sell “pharmaceutical intermediates” – the precursor chemicals needed to make a range of illegal drugs, including variants of MDMA, Ketamine, synthetic cannabinoids and the synthetic opioid fentanyl, which is primarily intended for medical use. In recent years, synthetic opioids known as nitazenes have become one of the most popular products among drug buyers.

More powerful than fentanyl

The United States has long accused China of flooding it with often-deadly synthetic opioids like fentanyl, which street dealers lace with other drugs like heroin and cocaine to increase profits. Fentanyl is many times more potent than heroin. This has led to a dramatic rise in overdoses, with more than 70,000 Americans estimated to have died from fentanyl in 2022.

According to the United Nations, the use of even more potent nitazenes is spreading rapidly around the world, raising concerns of a health crisis. In the UK, the National Crime Agency estimates there were 176 nitazene-related deaths between June 2023 and May 2024.

In 2022, the Office for National Statistics recorded 4,859 deaths from drug poisoning, half of which were opiate-related. This marks a decade of rising deaths from drug poisoning.

Chinese suppliers like Dina are confident they can continue to smuggle more Nitazenes into Britain. ‘There is no problem as long as the product passes through customs safely,’ she writes. They hide medicines in cosmetic packaging and send them via postal and courier companies.

A growing Chinese industry

China has the largest chemical and pharmaceutical industry in the world. International law enforcement agencies estimate that there are between 40,000 and 100,000 Chinese pharmaceutical companies. The size of the industry makes it difficult to regulate.

In April of this year, a report from a US Congressional hearing accused the Chinese government of subsidizing the illicit fentanyl trade by offering tax rebates to suppliers. These allegations were denied by the Chinese Communist Party. In 2019, China banned fentanyl and its analogues following US pressure. In January 2024, China and the US launched a joint operation to curb the production of the synthetic opioid fentanyl.

But America still claims that China is the primary source of precursor chemicals used by Mexican cartels to synthesize fentanyl before it is smuggled into America. U.S. law enforcement agencies estimate the international drug trade is worth $600 billion, with many pointing to China’s unique role in sponsoring it.

“If the Chinese government were to shut down all chemical production that they thought was illegal, you would see the global drug trade collapse,” said Ray Donovan, a former agent with the U.S. Drug Enforcement Agency. “It would immediately drop to a level where it would take a long time for criminal organizations to get back to that level of production.”

Donovan led the successful hunt for Mexican drug lord El Chapo in 2016. He is now focusing on China’s involvement in the synthetic opioid trade. “At one point, the State Department estimated there were 160,000 chemical companies and thousands of subbrokers. It’s a huge business,” Donovan said.

In 2023, China’s National Bureau of Statistics reported a youth unemployment rate of 14.9 percent. Many young people are finding it difficult to find work as China’s economy slows, leading some to turn to the country’s illegal drug trade.

A growing number of people are believed to be graduates, like 28-year-old Dina. She was introduced to the industry by a friend five years ago, after she left college, and says she takes her work seriously. “I lab-test all my products before I ship them to my customers,” she wrote.

A BBC investigation this year found thousands of posts on social media sites accessible in the UK advertising more than a dozen types of nitazenes and offering to buy them in bulk. The investigation revealed transactions worth millions of pounds in Bitcoin to suppliers claiming to work for Chinese companies.

Outside of Britain, synthetic drugs are transforming the drug trade around the world. Traffickers can operate anywhere there is an internet connection. And because synthetic drugs are cheap to produce and easy to smuggle, traffickers don’t have to wait for ‘harvests’ as they do with traditional drugs. Chemists can also stay one step ahead of the law by tweaking compounds and producing new versions of drugs when existing ones are banned.

Fear of an American-style crisis

China, for its part, claims that the U.S. fentanyl crisis is driven by demand, not supply. In 2022, a Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesperson argued that “the U.S. should deal with its own domestic problem instead of blaming China.” Abuse of synthetic opioids is not considered widespread in China.

“Fentanyl started showing up in street heroin,” said Sanho Tree, executive director of the U.S. Drug Policy Project. “It was very cheap, much more potent, easier to obtain, and it became very tempting for unscrupulous dealers to lace their heroin with fentanyl to increase their profits,” Tree said.

There are concerns that Britain could be facing a US-style drug crisis. Drug charities say the government should implement nationwide testing facilities and overdose prevention centres. “The demand is not going to go away,” said Adam Winstock, a doctor and founder of the Global Drug Survey, a UK-based report that examines drug-using trends around the world.

‘Governments need to focus on supply reduction, demand reduction and harm reduction. Above all these efforts are regulated markets. For synthetic drugs, governments need to get places like China to ban the production of precursors. But once that happens, production will move to a country with less regulation,’ said Winstock, who nevertheless believes Britain’s position is different to America’s.

“America’s problem was they had a prescription opioid crisis. Then came the Mexican cartels and turned fentanyl into heroin. We have much better regulation of prescription opioids,” he said.

Back to the law

In March this year, the UK government classified 15 synthetic opioids, including nitazenes, as Class A drugs. Dealers and manufacturers of the drugs now face life imprisonment. Anyone found in possession of the drugs faces up to seven years in prison under the Misuse of Drugs Act.

Tackling the use of Class A drugs, including synthetic opioids, is a priority for the National Crime Agency and law enforcement colleagues because of the harm they cause to users, society, the economy and communities, said Charles Yates, the agency’s deputy director. “Law enforcement and health partners are proactively monitoring to identify sudden spikes in drug-related deaths, so we can act quickly to reduce that threat,” he said.