China's role in the U.S. fentanyl epidemic
news.yahoo.com
news.yahoo.com
I’m not saying I have any idea what the real impactful decisions that fuel this problem even are, much less who is making them, triple much less what their intention is.
I’m not sure it is clear what is really fueling the opioid epidemic, many theories of causation are plausible.
But it seems hopelessly naive to discard outright the possibility that aggressive intention by the Chinese Government is a factor here.
Countries have done much, much, worse to each other (and their own people) in pursuit of various strategic objectives throughout all of recorded history. Why should we flat out assume that has somehow fundamentally changed?
China didn’t cause this, we did, but there are suppliers in China cashing in on it. But so are other suppliers in the US and elsewhere.
In the article, Ben Westhoff gives a much less conspiratorial explanation of why China was slow to crack down on fentanyl:
> China does not have a fentanyl crisis nearly the scope that the US does, or Canada, also has a really big problem. And so to a lot of people, this is why China hasn't really cracked down on its fentanyl industry, because its own people aren't dying from it. And so the way the Chinese government works is, fentanyl is illegal there, but it's not so much just the laws on the books, it's what resources the government dedicates to cracking down on different problems. And so when it comes to meth, which is a huge problem among Chinese citizens, the government has really focused on trying to stamp it out, take drug dealers down, disrupt operations. But when it comes to fentanyl being made there, that's just not the case.
Even the Islamic State (Isis) was mostly using US-produced bullets.
If the US invaded china and forced china to buy opium to offset the trade imbalance, then the parallel would apply.
I don't remember china invading the US. And china isn't forcing drugs on the US, no more than mexico or south america is forcing drugs on the US. There is demand for drugs in the US. That is the problem.
And the slow but recent drug legalization around the country and the glamorization of drugs in the media isn't going to help.
Do you feel clear on what their short, medium, and long term objectives are?
I’m sure I don’t.
It seems obvious there is at least some potential benefit to causing your biggest competitor for military and economic influence a bunch of costly problems ... but I truly have no idea what any of these leaders are thinking about.
Around 10 years ago, maybe a bit earlier, risk-averse European psychonauts started outsourcing the synthesis of novel molecules to labs in China, much like larger pharma research organizations were doing for basic synthetic work. Mine the literature, come up with some targets and proposed synthesis outline, outsource to Chinese vendors. The only work necessary on the buyer's end was to run analytical chemistry to ensure they were getting what was planned, then consume the drug to see how it behaves in vivo. Some of the more successful drugs that were sampled this way escaped the tight knit psychonaut groups and started popping up as items of commerce; does anyone remember the explosion of JWH series synthetic cannabinoids? (Fortunately, those strange brews seem less popular in the US since states started legalizing ordinary cannabis.)
The first really alarming substance I saw coming from these small custom synthesis vendors just has the code name U-47700 [3]; it's an opioid with a weird structure, never tested in humans until gray and dark market vendors put it on the map. I also saw opioid dependent chemists researching modifications of the OTC drug Loperamide [4] so that it could cross the blood brain barrier and satisfy their craving.
This is all a long winded way of saying that Chinese vendors were deliberately sought out by self-experimenting psychonauts and people with drug dependencies years before news reports of Chinese fentanyl in the US. It didn't start with opioids, but it eventually ended there. The drug flow from Chinese laboratories started as a Western "pull" rather than a Chinese "push." Opioids were also among the last drugs to start flowing in volume. That's why I think that attributing the drug flow to a Chinese government plan for Opium War revenge is ridiculous.
I had access to invite-only psychonaut/chemist forums for years. I tried visiting one of them just now and it's now just a domain landing page. So no citations for the chronology of my story, sorry, but major parts of it should be corroborated by what you can find on more open forums like Bluelight.
[1] Though the Federal Analogue Act in the US meant that novel "fun" compounds being sold for human consumption were illegal without any new legislation being needed.
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Web_Tryp
The only thing that is odd to me is what is legal and illegal to manufacture in China. The common "reason" for MXE being unavailable is that it is no longer legal in China, yet, fentanyl is?
But that conclusion doesn't even approximately follow from the preceding narrative, which just as easily could be seen as lending credence to the hypothesis you use it to reject, since it provides a very clear explanation as to how both the ground was laid off such an effort to be successful and how the Chinese government would become aware of that opportunity.
(The “Opium War” revenge is probably needlessly romanticized, even if the Chinese government did deliberately act on the opportunity, the motivation (even if the Opium War was part of the inspiration) was probably more prosaic geopolitical advantage by weakening rivals with costly internal problems, not revenge.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3UYmaalotK0
Repression only made it worse and I can only imagine how much worse it would have been with the possibility that every shot may have something far more potent.
Maybe the important bit is also how it was resolved:
https://www.thelocal.ch/20120531/3427
In short, save injection sites, controlled diaphin or other opioid replacement therapies made the life of addicts livable and reduced the harm that happened.
"Puzzled by rising drug deaths at raves in the United States, author and investigative journalist Ben Westhoff set out to find answers. A Google search for “Buy fentanyl in China” took him down a rabbit hole that led to a face-to-face meeting with the CEO of a company selling fentanyl on Skype “all day long” and a drug lab in Shanghai. Ben tells Jordan the remarkable story."
https://supchina.com/podcast/chasing-the-dragon-fentanyl-chi...
> Because many doctors are in private practice, they can benefit financially by increasing the volume of patients that they see, as well as by ensuring patient satisfaction, which can incentivize the overprescription of pain medication.
Then there are those that mean well and spike their produce successfully for a few runs, ... forgetting that it takes only 1 mistake and many will be dead as a result.
By the way, I have fentanyl patch prescriptions, and have done for years, due to medical issues. I use maybe 7-10 doses per year, with no real urge to take more. I can see how it can be appealing to people, but there has to be something in US society that makes fentanyl and other synthetic opioids so enticing.
Sure, how will you be paying for it sir? https://www.drugabuse.gov/drugs-abuse/fentanyl
Why doesnt say, singapore have an opiod crisis? China won't export to singapore?
Hmmmmmmmm
Do you have a better solution? For some people the pain can be unbearable.
There are some questions to which I’m in no position to give an answer:
- is a little temporary pain really problem?
- are there less invasive measures?
- what preventative measures do we have?
- are opiates just an easy way to cover up symptoms that could/should be treated properly?
This is why I believe it should be up to the patient to select whether to take opiates.
Fair point, but the same (edit: “unbearable” cost) applies to wasted lives.
I don’t claim to have a general answer, but it’s important to keep the pros and cons in context.
Unfortunately one half of the balance sheet is an externality, and our incentive system is set to exploit those ruthlessly.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Opium_Wars
Don't do drugs.
It's simply a few bad apples in an illegal market responding to the demand of the West and seriously why would anyone in China care as long as they don't sell this in China. It is bad-apples who want to get rich quickly but from a suppliers perspective it's short sighted because a dead addict isn't going to come back for more.
The real criminals to blame here are those that get people hooked on pharmaceuticals and then stop giving them the prescription for what they got them hooked on. No wonder they move from pain killers to heroin (or its substitutes).
edit: I highly recommend the excellent "Louis Theroux: Dark States" (episode Heroin Town). He gives a very empathic non-judgemental look into the tragedy of addiction in the US.
Sorry! I just wanted to point out some of the historical context. I don't have a particular fish to fry here.
> why would anyone in China care as long as they don't sell this in China.
That's a bit uncharitable, eh? There are a billion and a half people people in China, they can't all be moral cretins, can they?
edit: @carapace fwiw, I'd never thought so, or meant to accuse you of subscribing to conspiracy theories. what I meant here is that it could be construed as an incorrect cause->effect relation between opium wars and the crimes of US BigPharma. If you follow what is happening right now with the US in Munich at the security conference, then China isn't the evil that the US paints them as. China is a threat to the West for sure but the real terrorist really is the US (who are preparing for war): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YDRoY2PQsGg -> When I posted my reply my emotions were running a bit high on the hypocrisy that the US is pushing again in Munich. So I want to apologize for that. I also edited my above comment.
Cheers, that makes more sense. Sorry.
> I'd never thought so, or meant to accuse you of subscribing to conspiracy theories.
Oh but I do.
Robert Anton Wilson pointed out that in the last century, of regime changes, more than half came about as the result of a coup, conspiracy.
Or, as Colonel Hunter Gathers said so memorably, "The moment God crapped out the third cave man a conspiracy was hatched against one of them."
The ability to hatch conspiracy is the evolutionary driver of intelligence. What differentiates us from the animals is not language, but rather the ability to lie.
Anyhoo, that's a big ol' tangent. You didn't offend me, FWIW. We're cool.
Certainly, but with fentanyl specifically it would not surprise me if some of the Chinese smugglers thought that they do a heroic patriotic act.
We don't have any facts linking the CCP or any other institutions or legally run Chinese companies to do what has been done by the West back in these days.
Don't get prescribed drugs
-- 2000s variant
That's an insidious aspect here: people trust doctors, the drug dealers found an angle that blindsided the system.
I even thought what an edgy name every time I came across a comment - not once bothering to re-read ... human brains are terrible :D
Fentanyl is a relatively recent addition to a crisis those companies started in the early 90s.
> And so, when we're talking about who's to blame for the fentanyl crisis, we've got to start at home. Why is the demand so high? But in terms of China, and that's what I really focused on in my book in large part, China is not only doing a poor job stopping fentanyl from getting exported to the US, they are even encouraging it in a lot of ways, through the tax code and all these complicated ways that add up to a really troubling situation.
Do you disagree with any of that? Do you believe that China's massive and uncontrolled supply had no effect on the opioid epidemic?
That's not a bizarre position to take when most addicts started on prescribed meds, whether those meds were prescribed for them or diverted from friends and family members. People move onto fentanyl when they've developed a tolerance for prescription meds and can no longer get higher doses.
Why don't other places have such a big problem with fentanyl?
There isn't a fentanyl epidemic in japan, sweden, etc. So can't blame the "supply" here. "China" isn't making and sending these drugs for the hell of it. Somebody is ordering it and someone is distributing it. And it ain't the chinese.