Xinhua News Agency, Beijing, September 19th(International observation) China can’t solve the "poison disaster" of the United States — — The abuse of fentanyl in the United States
Xinhua News Agency reporter Zhu Ruiqing Qiu Xia
US President Biden recently announced that more than 20 countries, including China, will be listed as "major drug transit countries or major illegal drug producers". In this regard, a spokesman for the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of China said a few days ago that the so-called determination by the US side is groundless and is a malicious smear. China firmly opposes this and has made solemn representations to the US side.
In recent years, drug abuse has surpassed gun violence and car accidents, and has become the main cause of accidental death in Americans. Among them, the abuse of opioid drugs such as fentanyl is the most serious. The United States accounts for only 5% of the world’s population, but it consumes 80% of the world’s opioids. It can be described as a black hole and chaotic source of global drug control, and it is a dominant "major drug demand country". The root of the problem of fentanyl abuse lies in domestic factors such as lax supervision of psychotropic drugs in the United States, collusion between government and business, and political polarization hindering the anti-drug process. However, American politicians try to shift contradictions to the outside world and "throw the pot" at China.
Forcing others to "take medicine" cannot cure their own "illness", as Al Jazeera said, "This is a disaster made by the United States itself".
This is the White House filmed in Washington, DC on January 20th. Xinhua News Agency reporter Liu Jie photo
Why are opioids rampant in the United States?
Fentanyl was synthesized in the 1960s, and it was the first fentanyl used in clinic. After it came out, it was quickly popularized and applied in the field of clinical anesthesia and pain treatment. It once became the main drug used in anesthesia surgery, and it was also the first choice for pain treatment, especially for postoperative analgesia. After fentanyl, a series of new analgesics such as sufentanil, alfentanil and remifentanil appeared in the fentanyl family. So far, fentanyl is still the main auxiliary drug of general anesthesia and widely used postoperative analgesic.
As a medicine, fentanyl can relieve pain for countless patients with its good effect. But in the United States, it has become a drug that harms society.
According to the data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, fentanyl-based opioids are the main cause of overdose death in the United States. In the past ten years, the number of deaths caused by such drugs has increased by about three times. In 2021, this number surged to more than 80,000, more than 10 times the number of American soldiers killed in the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.
In fact, there have been three waves of opioid abuse in American society, and fentanyl is only the "protagonist" of the third wave. The first wave of abuse began around 1991. At that time, some pharmaceutical companies invested a lot of money to support relevant experts and institutions, peddled the "theory of harmlessness of opioids", encouraged doctors to prescribe more prescriptions and pharmacies to vigorously promote them.
On November 10, 2022, in Washington, DC, an airplane flew over the American flag. Xinhua News Agency reporter Liu Jie photo
On the one hand, this practice has formed an "analgesic culture" in American society, and people are accustomed to using painkillers to treat diseases. On the other hand, it has led to a sharp increase in the prescription of opioids at that time and a rapid increase in the number of deaths caused by opioids. The most typical example is Oxycontin, a drug developed by Purdue Pharmaceutical Company in the United States at that time. From 1999 to 2017, a total of 200,000 Americans died from overdose related to Oxycontin and other prescription opioids. In the end, Purdue Pharmaceutical was sued.
The second wave of drug abuse began around 2010. At that time, prescription opioids became difficult to obtain, and people turned their attention to heroin — — A lower cost and more powerful opioid drug. According to the data of the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the number of deaths caused by heroin overdose has increased rapidly since 2010. From 2010 to 2014, the death rate of heroin overdose among white Americans increased by 267%, African Americans by 213% and Latinos by 137%.
The third wave is the ongoing abuse of fentanyl. In recent years, fentanyl has become more and more popular among American drug addicts. According to data from the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, from August 2021 to August 2022, drug overdose claimed more than 100,000 lives, about two-thirds of which were caused by opioid drugs mainly fentanyl.
Looking back at the above three waves of abuse, it is not difficult to find that the addiction of abused drugs is stronger every time. And every wave of abuse paves the way for the next wave of more serious abuse, deepening America’s addiction to drugs again and again.
"It’s too late to put the devil in a bottle" and "the raging fire has broken through the fire line", which is how Anne Case, a professor at Princeton University, and angus deaton, a Nobel laureate in economics, described the problem of opium abuse in the United States in their book What’s wrong with America: Desperate Death and the Future of Capitalism. The book reads: "Opioid drugs have become an anesthetic for the public."
Pharmaceutical companies are deeply linked with politicians, so how to supervise them?
Under the pressure of public opinion, the US government has also taken actions to deal with drug abuse in the past few decades. For example, during the administration of former President Obama, he signed the 21st Century Cure Act, and spent $1 billion to deal with the abuse crisis of opioid prescription drugs used to treat moderate and severe pain. Trump took this issue as one of the priorities of the White House after taking office, and once listed the opioid crisis as a "national emergency"; Biden’s administration listed the problem of drug addiction as part of its "unity agenda", and listed the problem of mixing fentanyl with the non-opioid sedative toluene thiazide as the "latest threat" in the United States.
However, even so, why is drug abuse still banned in the United States? Why do addicts always find substitutes again and again? The fundamental reason is that American politicians, for their own interests and other reasons, always introduce anti-drug policies that treat the symptoms rather than the root causes, and are unwilling to implement drug supervision.
On the one hand, politicians get a lot of political contributions from pharmaceutical companies. In exchange, politicians need to "turn a blind eye" when formulating relevant drug control policies. As a result, the United States, as a big country of chemical raw materials in the world, has not yet managed fentanyl permanently.
According to a report in 2017 by the British newspaper The Guardian, over the past decade, pharmaceutical companies have invested nearly $2.5 billion in lobbying and funding US congressmen. About 90% of the U.S. House of Representatives and 97 of all 100 U.S. senators have received campaign donations from pharmaceutical companies, which seek to influence legislation on everything from the cost of drugs to the way new drugs are approved. In addition, in the American medical system, medical representatives play a great role. They encourage doctors to prescribe drugs by giving lectures and funding, which has caused many people to become addicted to drugs.
This is the capitol in Washington, DC, on January 19th. Xinhua News Agency (photo by Shen Ting)
Gao Jingzhu, a former assistant secretary of the US Department of Health and Human Services and a professor at Harvard University’s Chen Zengxi School of Public Health, pointed out that donations from opioid manufacturers to politicians continue to influence policy decisions. At the same time, retired officials from some government regulatory agencies often join the pharmaceutical industry, with almost no "cooling-off period". "This (drug abuse) crisis represents a multi-system regulatory failure."
On the other hand, political polarization hinders the drug control process. In view of the serious abuse of fentanyl in the United States, both parties in the United States admit that efforts need to be made to deal with this problem, but the two sides are "stumbling blocks" to each other and are unwilling to let the other side become the "hero" to solve this problem. Just in May this year, the Republican-controlled U.S. House of Representatives voted to consider the "Stop Trafficking in Fatal Fentanyl Act", and 133 members of the House of Representatives voted against it, 132 of whom were from the Democratic Party.
According to a report in Washington post, the US Congress didn’t pass a bill specifically for fentanyl until December 2017. However, it was nearly four years since legislators first received warnings about the dangers of this drug. "Congress has become incompetent and unable to meet the challenges of our time. Fentanyl is the latest example."
Treating internal diseases externally will only harm others and themselves.
Faced with the increasing abuse of fentanyl in the United States, the American government and politicians have done nothing in reducing domestic drug demand, strengthening the control of prescription drugs, and strengthening publicity and education on drug hazards. In response to the pressure of public opinion, they played "traditional skills" — — "Dumping the pot" abroad, and the main target of "dumping the pot" is China.
In recent years, the United States has repeatedly accused China of drug control, saying that "China imported a large amount of fentanyl into the United States" and "China chemicals flowed into Mexico to make fentanyl and then flowed into the United States", demanding that China "help crack down on the illegal trade of fentanyl". Recently, the United States frequently sued and sanctioned some enterprises in China and several citizens in China for allegedly producing and selling chemical precursors and related equipment involving fentanyl.
Some politicians in the United States always try to make China take the blame for the fentanyl problem and dress himself up as a "victim", but the American statement simply doesn’t hold water.
China has always held a "zero tolerance" attitude towards drugs, adopting the strictest control and the severest punishment. Fentanyl has never been abused on a scale outside the United States.
China is not only effective in drug control at home, but also always helps the international community, including the United States, to deal with the abuse of fentanyl in a humanitarian and responsible manner. In May 2019, China took the lead in arranging fentanyl substances in the whole world. According to the notification from the US Customs and Border Protection and other anti-drug law enforcement agencies, since September 2019, the US has not seized fentanyl from China.
China has also earnestly fulfilled its obligations under the 1988 Convention of the United Nations, and implemented an import and export licensing and international verification system for all listed chemicals, effectively preventing listed chemicals from flowing into the drug-making channels through international trade.
The United States sued and sanctioned China enterprises and citizens for allegedly producing and selling fentanyl-related chemical precursors and related equipment. However, these substances and equipment are non-listed chemicals and equipment and have a wide range of legal uses. According to international practice and common practice, it is the basic responsibility of the importing enterprise and the legal obligation of the importing government to ensure that the goods in international trade are not used for illegal purposes. The responsibilities that should be borne by the importer should not be imposed on the exporter.
With regard to the so-called fentanyl precursor flowing from China to Mexico, which was previously hyped by the US, the actual situation is that China has never received the relevant information from Mexico about "China precursor chemicals exported to Mexico for manufacturing drugs", and the US has never provided the factual basis for China chemicals flowing into Mexico to make fentanyl.
The above facts fully show that the relevant accusations made by the United States against China on the issue of fentanyl are unreasonable, and its purpose is to mislead the public and pass on the responsibility for its poor governance. As China’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs pointed out, "’s attempt to solve its concerns on drug control through pressure, coercion and illegal means is actually to treat internal diseases from outside, which will not work and will only harm others.".
