China's Role in the US Fentanyl Crisis

Overdoses on fentanyl and other synthetic opioids are the leading cause of death for Americans under the age of 45. China was for years the world’s primary source of fentanyl, but that changed when the country, in 2019, effectively banned fentanyl exports to the United States, a move that the Trump administration hailed. The celebration, unfortunately, was premature. Chinese chemical and shipping companies began instead selling precursor chemicals for manufacturing fentanyl to Mexican drug cartels, which subsequently smuggled the illicit material into the United States. Beijing denies that it is the cause of the US fentanyl crisis and blames the US pharmaceutical industry’s power and American social problems. US-China cooperation on counternarcotics efforts yielded results in the past, but such collaboration is constantly in flux. The two countries’ law enforcement agencies, for example, conducted joint investigations that led to convictions of fentanyl traffickers in 2019. But despite that success, China suspended, in the wake of former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s 2022 visit to Taiwan, bilateral cooperation in, among other critical areas, counternarcotics activity. The Biden administration is eager to restart cooperation to curb the fentanyl trade. To discuss China’s role in the fentanyl crisis, host Bonnie Glaser speaks with Dr. Vanda Felbab-Brown, a foreign policy senior fellow at the Brookings Institution’s Strobe Talbott Center for Security, Strategy, and Technology. Felbab-Brown is also director of the Initiative on Nonstate Armed Actors and co-director of the Brookings series “The Opioid Crisis in America: Domestic and International Dimensions”. Her book, Narco Noir: Mexico’s Cartels, Cops, and Corruption, will be released in January 2025.

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China’s rise has captivated and vexed the international community. From defense, technology, and the environment, to trade, academia, and human rights, much of what Beijing does now reverberates across the map. China Global is a new podcast from the German Marshall Fund that decodes Beijing’s global ambitions as they unfold. Every other week, host Bonnie Glaser will be joined by a different international expert for an illuminating discussion on a different aspect of China’s foreign policy, the worldview that drives its actions, the tactics it’s using to achieve its goals—and what that means for the rest of the world.