Research: PRC principal supplier of precursors for dangerous synthetic drugs
Felix Kim
Lax law enforcement by officials in the People’s Republic of China (PRC), coupled with the ongoing activities of Chinese criminal gangs, known as triads, have enabled the continued production and distribution of dangerous synthetic drugs. Drugs including the stimulant methamphetamine and the opioid fentanyl persistently flood markets in the Indo-Pacific and the Americas, costing lives and wrecking livelihoods, according to recent research.
“China remains the principal supplier of precursor chemicals for the production of fentanyl, not just in the United States but across all of North America,” Vanda Felbab-Brown, senior fellow and director of the Initiative on Nonstate Armed Actors at the Brookings Institution, said during a Brookings webinar in late March 2022. “Very rarely,” she added, does PRC law enforcement “act against the top echelon of the triads that are critical suppliers of precursor chemicals for fentanyl, but also for methamphetamine across Southeast Asia.”
Felbab-Brown based her findings on 94 fieldwork interviews in the Indo-Pacific and the Americas with counternarcotics and law enforcement personnel, along with businesspeople, investigative journalists and others in late 2021.
Overdoses killed more than 100,000 Americans between October 2020 and September 2021, she said, with opioids accounting for nearly 80,000 deaths. Statistics across the Indo-Pacific are harder to come by, but available evidence showed a burgeoning crisis, with nearly 2,000 overdose deaths in Australia in 2019, and 4 million users of illicit drugs in Indonesia with an estimated 33 drug-related deaths reported each day. (Pictured: Philippine drug enforcement officers tag bags of suspected methamphetamine seized from a Chinese man’s home in Valenzuela after his March 2022 arrest on drug possession charges.)
Faced with government pressure at home, PRC suppliers of illicit synthetic drugs have shifted from selling finished products to overseas markets to distributing precursor compounds from which fentanyl, methamphetamine and other drugs are made in such places as Mexico and Myanmar, Felbab-Brown explained.
Her findings revealed that the PRC is now the primary source of precursor chemicals for methamphetamine manufacturing in East Asia and Mexico. “Pre-precursors from China continue to head to illicit drug producers in Southeast Asia, such as Myanmar,” she said. “Chinese drug smuggling networks, such as the triads, then distribute meth across Asia and to Australia and New Zealand. Mexican drug cartels also source their precursors from China and sell finished meth to the U.S. and elsewhere.”
Methamphetamine sold in Australia is still controlled by PRC syndicates, she noted, but it now originates as a finished product in Myanmar.
In May 2019, Beijing put the whole class of fentanyl-type pharmaceuticals, as well as two major fentanyl precursors, under a tight regulatory system. Felbab-Brown found, however, that by shipping unregulated dual-use chemicals to labs in Mexico, where they serve as precursors for making fentanyl, PRC operatives escape prosecution.
Beijing seldom intervenes in the operations of top-tier PRC criminal syndicates, “unless they specifically cross a narrow set of interests of the Chinese government,” Felbab-Brown wrote in a March 2022 report that paralleled the webinar. “Chinese criminal groups cultivate political capital with Chinese authorities and government officials abroad by also promoting China’s political, strategic and economic interests.”
Beijing denies any responsibility for Mexico’s illicit drug trade and maintains that regulations and enforcement are the duty of customs officials and law enforcement agencies there, she added. This denial continues even as evidence mounts that PRC criminal actors engage in money laundering and the “barter of wildlife products” to facilitate their illicit drugs business.
Felix Kim is a FORUM contributor reporting from Seoul, South Korea.
IMAGE CREDIT: THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
