Vivek Ramaswamy claimed that precursor drugs used to make fentanyl “are coming from labs in Wuhan, China” and going to Mexican drug cartels.
TRUE. Wuhan is one of China’s top chemical-producing cities and for years dominated fentanyl manufacturing; it has since evolved into the home of top suppliers of fentanyl precursor ingredients.
Ramaswamy noted Wuhan’s status as the home of several chemical corporations linked to the production of fentanyl – and, in particular, accused of selling precursor drugs to Mexican cartels that then produce the fentanyl and ship it to the United States. Ramaswamy was responding to a question on Wednesday night during a Republican presidential primary debate, hosted by the network NewsNation.
Asked if his promise to use the military to eliminate drug labs in Mexico was “giving false hope” to Americans plagued by an increasingly severe fentanyl overdose crisis, Ramaswamy described the decision to combat the cartels as “the easy part.”
“The easy part is talking about how we are going to use our military to secure the border. I will, and I believe that everybody else [on stage] wants to do the same thing,” he responded. “But the harder part is dealing with the crisis of purpose and meaning, the mental health epidemic raging across this country like wildfire.”
Ramaswamy returned to the origin of fentanyl later in his answer, asserting, “A lot of these [precursor materials] are coming from labs in Wuhan, China, of all places, drug materials that are going to the Mexican drug cartels that they are pumping across that southern border like a modern opium war.
