Saying "we'll spend a lot of time, effort and money" is very different from actually doing something, for example restricting their sales/production to 5% of the current levels. Opioids are prescribed to 1/3 of the population at the moment, and that doesn't even include the illegal usage. Can you imagine the neonatal issues, and the resultant repercussions of bringing up a whole generation of addicts?

He says he wants to spend money on it, but judging by the types of people he's put into positions that have no qualifications to be there, it's hard to see his future intentions as anything more than funneling money to people connected to him.

The one thing that the US has consistently shown recently is for every state that has legalized or decriminalized/medicinal marijuana, opioid abuse and related deaths have plummeted, yet we have trump trying to crack down on this emerging trend.

So it's just more of say one thing but do another.

China's Century of Humiliation started on the eve of the opium war. The current Chinese government has a goal to never let China ever experience anything like that ever again. I visited their museum of Chinese history in Xian, really eye opening about how this thought drives almost ALL of their foreign and domestic policy.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Century_of_humiliation

The Century of Humiliation started them on a road of weakness that took several revolutions to figure out how to stop. Only with Deng Xiaoping in the 80s did China begin to find its stride, and only now are they starting to finally become a world power that the world needs to reckon with instead of ignore. Whatever you think of politics and philosophies, China is now considered a world power in a way it never has been before.

Probably he meant that China went from being a top #1 economy in the world by a huge margin when the opioid epidemic began there, and it has just recently became #1 again, so far by a small margin. That sounds about right. They lost ca. 200 years.

Of course explaining that by opioids alone would be balancing between a huge oversimplification and a plain lie, but at least opioids have been the biggest single factor.

The opium wars were from 1839 to 1860. If you check out this graph of Chinese percentage of global GDP since 1000AD, it started dropping from about 30% to <10% around the time of the wars and started recovering around 1970 but still isn't back to where they used to be. You could argue us brits owe them a few trillion in damages.

In the scheme of a 1000 years of history you could argue 1970 counts as only now perhaps.

https://www.economist.com/blogs/graphicdetail/2012/06/mis-ch...