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If you were to ask yourself when America has faced the very worst drug crisis in its history the answer would be right now.
For the first time in U.S. history, fatal overdoses peaked above 112,000 deaths, with young people and people of color among the hardest hit.
Drug policy experts, and people living with addiction, say the magnitude of this calamity now eclipses every previous drug epidemic, from crack cocaine in the 1980s to the prescription opioid crisis of the 2000s.
Public health experts say fentanyl, a synthetic opioid far more powerful than heroin, is responsible for the majority of drug deaths. But the supply of illegal drugs is increasingly complex and perilous…
Drug deaths first began to soar in the U.S. in early 2020 — from an already devastating 65,000 a year — to what policy makers fear is a new baseline of more than 110,000 a year.
Fentanyl is mostly manufactured by drug cartels in Mexico and brought across the border by smugglers. The cartels get the chemicals used to make the drug almost exclusively from China. Today a House panel released a report which found that China continues to subsidize the export of fentanyl precursors.
China is fueling the fentanyl crisis in the U.S. by directly subsidizing the manufacturing of materials that are used by traffickers to make the drug outside the country, according to a report released Tuesday by a special House committee focused on countering the Chinese government.
Committee investigators said they accessed a government website that revealed tax rebates for the production of specific fentanyl precursors as well as other synthetic drugs as long as those companies sell them outside of China.
“Through its actions, as our report has revealed, the Chinese Communist Party is telling us that it wants more fentanyl entering our country,” said Rep. Mike Gallagher, the Republican chairman of the special House committee. “It wants the chaos and devastation that has resulted from the epidemic.”
Just last November President Biden had a discussion with Xi Jinping and then announced he’d made an agreement to crack down on the sale of precursor chemicals:
At the press conference, Biden announced that he and Xi reached an understanding about reducing the flow of fentanyl from China to the U.S.
«We’re taking action to significantly reduce the flow of precursor chemicals and pill presses from China to the Western hemisphere,» Biden said. «It’s going to save lives and I appreciate President Xi’s commitment on this issue.»
Specifically, the US had convinced China in 2019 to regulate fentanyl as a narcotic and to stop selling it and its precursor chemicals in the US.
