Slaughter of young Americans from deadly fentanyl produced in Chinese labs must end

(Population Research Institute) — In May 2019, China declared a “People’s War” on the United States.

This phrase, which comes from the days of Chairman Mao, meant that the Chinese Communist Party had determined to use all the weapons at its disposal — short of open warfare — to weaken and destroy the United States.

These weapons included fentanyl, the precursors for which are manufactured in China’s labs before being shipped to the cartels in northern Mexico. From there, they are sent to the streets of our major cities, which have been turned into the 21st-century equivalent of open-air opium dens — or war zones.

The result of China’s chemical warfare on the U.S. is that drug deaths have shot up over the past few years. The figure below, drawn from a recent study from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, shows how the rates have risen.

Figure 1. Age-adjusted rate of drug overdose deaths, by sex: United States, 2002–2022. 

In 2022 alone, 109,000 Americans, mostly in their teens and 20s, died from drug overdoses. And most of these deaths were from fentanyl, the most dangerous drug ever concocted.

If you ask politicians who is responsible for this carnage, you will get starkly different answers depending on who you talk to. Democrat politicians will point to the Mexican drug cartels who smuggle in fentanyl, although they brush off questions about the open border. They will criticize the drug dealers who distribute and sell it but avoid calling for more policing. Above all, they will call for drug treatment programs to be expanded and propose that addicts be given free needles and milder, non-lethal drugs to wean them off the more deadly stuff.

Republicans will point to the porous border, the failure of Democratic-run cities to police the problem, and call for the death penalty for drug dealers.

The problem with both of these sets of proposed solutions is that the driving force behind the fentanyl crisis is not the cartels or the dealers. Or will simply securing the border resolve the problem, although it will help.

The source of the problem lies across the Pacific. As Republican U.S. Sen. Susan Collins of Maine recently noted, “The fentanyl crisis begins and ends in China.”

The master drug dealer behind the deadly fentanyl epidemic resides in Beijing. Xi Jinping and his fellow Politburo members constitute the largest and deadliest drug cartel the world has ever seen.

Without China’s supply of the chemical precursors to fentanyl the production of the opiate in cartel-run labs would grind to a halt. And without China’s willingness to launder billions of dollars profits, the cartels would be drowning in hard-to-hide cash, their money neither portable nor investable.

Communist Party leaders know exactly which pharmaceutical companies in China are producing and shipping the chemicals needed to make fentanyl. And they are encouraging this by subsidizing the exports and helping to launder the profits.

Corrupt Beijing officials are deliberately using the Mexican drug cartels to wage a kind of proxy war against the United States and its citizens.

Just as the CCP provided arms, ammunition, and funding to Cambodia’s Khmer Rouge, which wound up killing millions during its short but bloody reign, so the CCP is providing “ammunition and funding” to the Mexican cartels to kill young Americans and devastate their families.

Adding insult to injury, as American casualties mount, so do China’s profits.

Xi Jinping himself declared this “People’s War” against the U.S. And it is he who must be strong-armed into bringing it to an end.

On this issue, the differences between the two presidential candidates are stark.

Kamala Harris, on her 20-minute photo-op at the U.S.-Mexico border in Arizona in September, vowed to target the “entire global fentanyl supply chain.” But the country where that chain begins and ends   — China — was left unmentioned.

Indeed, Harris has openly said that America’s biggest threat was … Iran.

As far as her running mate, Tim Walz, is concerned, he is even less likely to criticize a country with which he has long had disturbingly close ties and where, as he says, he “learned a lot about governance.”

Trump, on the other hand, has shown that he is willing to get tough on China and is prepared to end China’s chemical warfare against the U.S. once and for all.

The Trump campaign told Reuters that he “will use his executive power to stop the drug epidemic and protect Americans from dangerous drugs.”

That power includes punitive tariffs.

Trump understands that only when the cost to Beijing of killing tens of thousands of young Americans each year exceeds the billions of dollars it makes off the drug trade will China bring the slaughter to a halt.

Trump will make the drug cartel called the Chinese Communist Party an offer they can’t refuse.

Steven W. Mosher is the president of the Population Research Institute and the author of The Devil and Communist China (TAN Books).