China Uses Fentanyl for War With US by Other Means
For Beijing to tolerate, in the name of geopolitics, an opioid trade that kills tens of thousands of Americans a year is too cynical for words.
From China, with love.
Photographer: Johannes Eisele/AFP via Getty Images
If and when Joe Biden and Xi Jinping meet at an economic summit in San Francisco next month, the US president will at some point confront his Chinese counterpart about the fentanyl epidemic raging in that city and across America.
Xi, for his part, would deny responsibility for the more than 70,000 Americans killed by this synthetic opioid last year. The Chinese line is that the US is “scapegoating” China and has only itself to blame for becoming the “global drug den.” At the same time, Xi knows all too well that China is the primary source of the precursor chemicals that show up, via Mexico, on the American market as fentanyl.