Biden and Xi's Fentanyl Compromise: What Will It Accomplish?
In the words of the guy who sings "War (What Is It Good For)": Absolutely nothing!
Yesterday President Biden and Chinese President Xi Jinping met outside of San Francisco.
Considering U.S.-China relations have been awful recently, this was a big deal, and among the topics discussed were the exports of fentanyl precursors by Chinese companies.
Fentanyl precursors — the most important ingredients needed to make fentanyl — are driving the U.S. drug crisis. China makes the precursors and the Mexican cartels buy them, finish the fentanyl and send the drugs north across the border.
The cartels could make fentanyl from scratch, but they couldn’t do so nearly as cheaply as using ingredients from China.
Many of these fentanyl precursors are legal in China, and the US has long been pressuring China to ban them. But that’s not the main issue. Even if all the precursors were banned, chemists could just use “pre-precursors,” and you can’t ban all of those, since they’re also used to make many legitimate chemicals.
Instead, Biden pressured Xi to punish Chinese companies who sell to the cartels. Right now most of these companies do no due diligence at all, selling directly to the cartels or their front companies.
Xi indeed agreed to crack down on these companies, and China will presumably begin monitoring their sales, requiring them to file reports on whom they’re selling to.
"We're taking action to significantly reduce the flow of precursor chemicals and pill presses from China to the Western hemisphere," Biden said after the meeting. "It's going to save lives and I appreciate President Xi's commitment on this issue."*
*Pill presses are used by traffickers use to make fake prescription pills cut with fentanyl — say, fake Percocets, or fake Xanax. Indeed, most of these presses come from China. But they’re also used by legitimate pill manufacturers. So, as with the precursors, figuring out who is buying them is the main issue, and it’s not clear that this agreement will help with that.
Xi’s pledge to crack down on fentanyl precursors is a nice gesture. Actually doing so, however, will be a hugely complicated bureaucratic maneuver, and might never actually happen, considering China’s drug and chemical enforcement apparatus is notoriously understaffed.
If they were able to follow through, however, it could make a difference. Why? Because drug traffickers in China actually follow the law. Sure, there are plenty of rogue actors, but the vast majority of the companies supplying fentanyl precursors pay taxes and fear the government. If China requires them to do background checks on their customers, they will.
But will this stop the fentanyl problem in the US? No! Of course not. If the cartels can’t buy fentanyl precursors from China, they’ll just source them from Indian companies, who also sell them cheaply, and are even less regulated.
As I’ve said repeatedly, there’s no way to stop drugs from getting into this country. We waste tens of billions every year trying to do so, but if we can’t even stop drugs from getting into our prisons, we can’t stop the flow across the borders.
That said, however, I think it’s great that the American and Chinese leaders are back at the negotiating table. Since China banned all fentanyl analogues in 2019 (the high-water mark for U.S.-China relations on fentanyl), the relationship has suffered badly. After Trump blamed China for covid, and Nancy Pelosi visited Taiwan, China announced it would stop collaborating with us on prosecuting drug criminals.
Now, however, there’s thaw. What did Xi get in return for the precursor crackdown? Apparently, Biden agreed to lift U.S. technology sanctions on China's Institute of Forensic Science, part of their Ministry of Justice. The U.S. had sanctioned them because it believed they were using our tech to spy on the Uyghur population.
For Biden, concerned with reelection, this meeting was an obvious win: He now has a rare positive headline concerning the fentanyl epidemic, and all he had to do was sell out the Uyghurs, whose name most Americans can’t even pronounce.
I consider this a bad trade, especially since it won’t reduce fentanyl deaths here. But I’m still glad this pair is back at the negotiating table. From a geopolitical standpoint, the world is better off when its two superpowers are on speaking terms.
PS. Here’s my TedX talk on this issue!
Thank you so much for writing this! Incredibly helpful to understand the nuances of the policies at play
I caught the recent NPR interview with you about this, Ben. Well done.