The government is spending record amounts, just to slow its growth
to the intractable nature of America’s fentanyl epidemic that officials measure progress not in falling numbers of deaths, but in a slowing rate of growth. After a decade of horrifying ascent, the administration of President Joe Biden points out, the yearly number of fatal overdoses appears at last to be slowing to a gentle climb . The figure for 2022 was just 5% higher than that of 2021.
At first most fentanyl came to America directly from China. In 2019, however, China outlawed the sale of finished fentanyl and two of the chemicals most commonly used to make it. At that point Mexico assumed a critical role in the supply chain, importing different precursor chemicals from China, which are then “cooked” and sent north. Ashley, another former addict now in recovery in Tucson, used to be a partner of the Mexican gangsters who run this business.
A 50-year-old fentanyl trafficker in Culiacán says he is also out of the business. He entered it two years ago, picking up precursors from airports, the coast and elsewhere and delivering them to others, as well as distributing finished fentanyl pills to mules. He made 15 to 20 such deliveries a month. Now he says he has no work “because of pressure from thegovernment”. He has started farming corn and wheat on land where he used to grow marijuana and opium poppies.
American officials are now a bit more cheery. At a meeting with Mr Biden in San Francisco in November, Xi Jinping, China’s leader, agreed that his government would resume talks about fentanyl: the two sides duly met to discuss the problem in January. According to an American official, the Chinese authorities have put chemical firms “on notice” that they will start to crack down on trade in precursors.
Vanda Felbab-Brown of the Brookings Institution, an American think-tank, notes that it was more than a decade after cocaine had swept America before it eventually reached Europe, too, in the 1990s. That was a result not of changing consumer tastes, but of a decision by Mexico’s cartels to find a new market, she says. Ms Felbab-Brown argues they will do the same again with synthetic opioids.
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