“We’re shipping to the US” – inside China’s synthetic opioid networks (2020) | Hacker News Reader

“We’re shipping to the US” – inside China’s synthetic opioid networks (2020)

npr.org

29 points737min17 comments

This deadly racket uses letters to send Fentanyl and more dangerous drugs to dealers in the USA. Pure Fentanyl has a lethal dose in the average male of 2 milligrams. This is a small quantity. 1 gram will dissolve in 40 milliliters of water. The drug sellers then wet paper with the solution, it takes a few sheets. Then they dry it and laser print data sheets for anything and you will have 1 gram spread evenly through the paper, might be any data at all, the object is to make it pass inspection after it is mailed as innocent data sheets. The USA buyer then washes the paper repeatedly with water - using repeated small amounts of distilled water. It might take 10-20 washes, one after the other, and it is then dissolved in the water. Then they have a solution they can evaporate to dryness, and they will recover almost 1 gram as a powder. With a laser printer very little black ink dissolves as particles, but if there are, it can be filtered before they dry it. If they use unsized and non glossy paper, and distilled water, the purity will remain and the final dry powder will remain potent. They then sell it. Since milligram doses are a nuisance, they often mix it with a powder - here is where the fatalities occur. It is very hard to make a uniform finely mixed powder. Drug companies have detailed procedures to mix fine powders with safety and uniformity, so they avoid any lumps. A lump can kill a person. Once they have their powder, perhaps they now have 1000 grams with a gram mixed in it - each gram of powder = 1/2 fatal dose. They then get a pill press and make 10,000 pills of 100 milligrams each = the same gram is now in pill form, with 1/20th of a fatal dose in each one. If the mix was well done and tightly pressed(the mixing powder will be chosen to make pills that are strongly bound as pills) they have an item they can sell, telling the buyer what is in each pill. All is well - unless there were a few lumps in the initial separation = a few dead buyers/customers/addicts etc. There are some Fentanyl derivatives that are 15 times as toxic = smaller lumps can kill. The first class mail path is the safest, but most time consuming mail method. Expresspost is faster, but it is inspected more closely. There are other bulk methods, as listed on the DEA website here. I am a retired chemist and the only way to deal with this on this side is rigorous inspection of the mails letter by letter with testers (which can be trained rats or other animals that can detect any drug odor - if at all possible). China clearly does not have the will to rigorously deal with this problem, but they do have the power - if they are persuaded it is in their best interest?

https://www.dea.gov/galleries/drug-images/fentanyl

There is more data in that website, poke around to see the dimensions of this threat.

They would probably be safer to just distribute the paper torn into sheets/squares. The corners and edges would probably be "hot", but for a few 100sq in pages, you would expect ~3mg/sq in and 0.4mg/cm2. Then the buyer knows what they're getting and can extract it (eat, smoke, dissolve and shoot) themselves. Next print artwork on the sheets and sell them at Dead Shows!

Some in China really do consider this "payback" for the opium wars. I suspect sadly it will end up rebounding in unexpected and unfortunate ways.

> Some in China really do consider this "payback" for the opium wars.

Considering that the US played NO role at all in either of the opium wars and donated its Boxer Rebellion reparations to help found Tsinghua University (Xi Jinping's alma mater), this false historical narrative is especially lamentable.

Maybe a visit to the heritage park in Guilin honoring the US Flying Tigers in WW II is in order?

https://www.flyingtigershistoricalorganization.com/museum-de...

The Tsinghua University in Beijing is a very different institution after 1949. A large group of Tsinghua faculty staff and alumni relocated to Taiwan including its longest serving president, Mei Yiqi. What was left behind soon got dismantled and reorganized along with other universities, turning every university including Tsinghua into Soviet-style institutions that focused on strictly defined disciplines instead of having a wide range of faculties. Its self-proclaimed long heritage before the PRC was not promoted much until the 80's when China started to reform and open up. The endowment fund set up from Boxer Rebellion reparations now belongs to National Tsinghua University in Taiwan and so is Tsinghua's American connection.

A lot of blue blood northeastern old money got their start selling opium to China during the opium wars. The Forbes family, the Astor family, the Delano family of Delano-Roosevelt fame.

The US also got a treaty after the opium wars that exempted US citizens from being tried under Chinese law, kind of like the British did.

Yes, The power of The British Raj https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/British_Raj drove opium into China. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/First_Opium_War Back when I was in college they sold hits of acid via paper disk cut from paper where an LSD solution had been dried, they also used blotting paper, but that was hard to get after Biro invented the ball point pen and Bic flooded the world with them and the fountain pen, quills, nibs etc, and of course blotting paper became endangered species, they then used card stock. Other methods were used. Connaught Labs had a staff flirtation with LSD as they were using it for psychiatric purposes (long before it became a listed drug) and I, as a student chemist had a summer job there in 1960 and it was passed around. Soon after that, in 1968 it became a listed drug. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lysergic_acid_diethylamide#:~:....

This is one of the biggest stories of the last decade. The huge surge in homeless people and tent cities in the major metropolitans over the last few years will probably turn out to be due to a drug epidemic happening right before our eyes.

This drug epidemic would not have occurred had xenophobes not been allowed to craft law and terrorize the public with fictional propaganda. These drug runners saw an opportunity and took it. It’s no different than what the sackler family did. Both are unjustifiable in civilized society.

https://drugpolicy.org/issues/brief-history-drug-war

Mixing cause and effect? Desperation (economic, social life, etc) leads to escapism, among them substance abuse, leading people to lose even more grasp of life and lose their homes?

There's an epidemic of loneliness, I wonder why, is it people having FOMO due to social media, reality TV, etc?

It would be very interesting to understand this part of the story in more detail, although I expect it’s more complicated than the statement above. But someone should really research this properly.

> It led to more than 37,000 overdose deaths in the U.S. in 2019

Old article, should have (2020) in it as this is the number #1 cause in 2020

(Adults 18-45)

Abstinence only education isn’t the solution

Any country that encourages or at least turns a blind eye to criminal enterprises targeting its rivals is encouraging privateering and will eventually be hoist with its own petard.

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