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I thought this was already well-established public information? That fentanyl came mostly from China was never in doubt, what people were arguing about was whet

I thought this was already well-established public information? That fentanyl came mostly from China was never in doubt, what people were arguing about was whether this was happening with the tacit approval of the Chinese government. Then in 2023 China cracked down on it, and supplies dried up. Whether that was because it was a big enough issue to get their attention, or it was on purpose and they decided it was no longer serving their interests I suspect we'll never know, but I definitely read multiple articles in 2023 about the fentanyl crackdown in China.

defrost 10mo ago
Biden era cooperation with China on the issue was at the heart of this. It wasn't about the direct supply of Fentanyl, or even (by that stage) the direct supply of Fentanyl precursor drugs .. (that gangs used to industrial shed chem lab into Fentanyl) ... this was cutting back and limiting bulk supply of the precursor precursors to shady onselling networks to starve the labs. Was going well (as per the paper) until US / China relations went in the toilet. Some of this is covered in The Hidden Cost of Trump’s Trade War on China (March 18, 2025) - https://www.nytimes.com/2025/03/18/opinion/trump-china-trade-war.html https://www.nytimes.com/2025/03/18/opinion/trump-china-trade... written by a former deputy assistant secretary for US international narcotics and law enforcement affairs. ADDENDUM: 20 page PDF of data, graphs, suppleentary material from the original 8th January 2026 Science paper Did the illicit fentanyl trade experience a supply shock? Kasey Vangelov et al (doi/10.1126/science.aea6130) here: https://www.science.org/doi/suppl/10.1126/science.aea6130/suppl_file/science.aea6130_sm.pdf https://www.science.org/doi/suppl/10.1126/science.aea6130/su...
- alephnerd 10mo ago
  Mexico also began enacting extremely heavy handed tariffs against China and other Asian exporters like South Korea, India, and Vietnam in 2023 onwards [0][1][2][3] in order to protect their domestic manufacturing capacity against an export-driven supply shock, which hit Mexico really badly in the 2000s [4]. > Was going well (as per the paper) until US / China relations went in the toilet Yep, but as long as Mexico continues to enact trade barriers to protect against an Asian export shock, the APIs needed for synthesis will remain difficult for organized crime to acquire. Already, cartels have begun tariff arbitraging by targeting the CEE and the Balkans as a new base for synthetic opioid operations [5][6][7], especially because Romanian [8] and other CEE gangs had been collaborating with Mexican organized crime on financial and human trafficking crimes in Mexico for over a decade now. [0] - https://www.whitecase.com/insight-alert/mexico-imposes-temporary-import-duties-25-more-588-non-fta-tariff-items https://www.whitecase.com/insight-alert/mexico-imposes-tempo... [1] - https://www.whitecase.com/insight-alert/mexico-reinstates-tariff-hikes-ranging-5-50-over-544-goods https://www.whitecase.com/insight-alert/mexico-reinstates-ta... [2] - https://www.whitecase.com/insight-alert/mexico-proposes-significant-customs-and-tariff-reforms-part-2026-economic-package https://www.whitecase.com/insight-alert/mexico-proposes-sign... [3] - https://www.whitecase.com/insight-alert/mexico-formalizes-and-expands-import-tariffs-more-1400-products-key-impacts https://www.whitecase.com/insight-alert/mexico-formalizes-an... [4] - http://international-economy.com/TIE_Sp03_Rosen.pdf http://international-economy.com/TIE_Sp03_Rosen.pdf [5] - https://www.europol.europa.eu/media-press/newsroom/news/largest-ever-synthetic-opioid-laboratory-in-poland-dismantled https://www.europol.europa.eu/media-press/newsroom/news/larg... [6] - https://balkaninsight.com/2024/07/24/fentanyl-central-europe-sees-pockets-of-rising-synthetic-opioid-use/ https://balkaninsight.com/2024/07/24/fentanyl-central-europe... [7] - https://www.brookings.edu/articles/the-foreign-policies-of-the-sinaloa-cartel-and-cjng-part-v-europes-supercoke-and-on-the-horizon-issues-and-the-middle-east/ https://www.brookings.edu/articles/the-foreign-policies-of-t... [8] - https://www.occrp.org/en/project/how-a-crew-of-romanian-criminals-conquered-the-world-of-atm-skimming https://www.occrp.org/en/project/how-a-crew-of-romanian-crim...
  - defrost 10mo ago
    That absolutely played a part also. The biggest takeaway that deserves stressing over and over again is that Things Take Time .. it generally takes 18 months and longer to substantially impact global flows. The work has to be put in early, kept up in practice, and results are often credited to political actors down the road of time. TTT - Piet Hein - https://www.circlepublications.net/grooks https://www.circlepublications.net/grooks
    - alephnerd 10mo ago
      Absolutely!
- stevenwoo 10mo ago
  Different articles confirming this with multiple approaches and data points https://www.npr.org/2026/01/08/nx-s1-5661523/biden-made-big-gains-battling-street-fentanyl-lost-messaging-war-trump https://www.npr.org/2026/01/08/nx-s1-5661523/biden-made-big-... https://www.psypost.org/sudden-drop-in-fentanyl-overdose-deaths-linked-to-biden-era-global-supply-shock/ https://www.psypost.org/sudden-drop-in-fentanyl-overdose-dea...
cyberax 10mo ago
No, it was in doubt. Now fentanyl is produced from readily available precursors in Mexico. In underground labs: https://www.nytimes.com/2024/12/29/world/americas/inside-fentanyl-lab-mexico.html https://www.nytimes.com/2024/12/29/world/americas/inside-fen... Fentanyl is so potent that just one lab can easily satisfy all the US demand with it, around 10kg a day. That's also why it's ridiculously hard to fight, one smuggled barrel of pure product can supply the entire US for months. So no, there is no "supply shock". There's just more free Narcan (naloxone).
- cogman10 10mo ago
  Cocaine death decreases is the hard thing to explain with either theory, supply or naloxone. Fentanyl supply doesn't affect cocaine in any way and naloxone doesn't work on a cocaine OD. Maybe some percentage of cocaine deaths are misattributed fentanyl deaths? I also wonder if there's any link to the Oxycontin reforms. Perhaps now that prescription is reigned in, we are seeing a lot fewer oxy->fent cases which has cut back on the deaths. Or maybe it's actually that the drug dealers have gotten more careful. Drug dealers don't want to kill their clients, so maybe they've been purposefully diluting to make sure they get repeat customers.
  - jddj 10mo ago
    In Europe the per kg price of cocaine has apparently halved. If that's the case in the US as well, it could be that as a result there's more cocaine in the cocaine and fewer adulterants.
    - mjanx123 10mo ago
      People don't have the money to buy drugs, deaths go down and price as well (albeit slower).
      - zdragnar 10mo ago
        For addicts, the drug is the last thing they cut back on when money is tight.
tehjoker 10mo ago
People are always talking about this precusor from China, but I have no idea what this precursor is. Are they chemicals that are useful for lots of things or is it only useful for this? Because if it is the former, then China is just selling regular ass legal chemicals because they are the worlds number 1 supplier of manufactured goods.
- defrost 10mo ago
  The challenge in international drug operations was not to get China to stop selling bricks to house builders to but get China to cooperate in stopping the sale of bricks to groups that only use bricks to throw through windows and at heads.
  - tehjoker 10mo ago
    That’s tricky because if the US asks to stop the sale of precursors used for making medicines to an organization they name, it’s not always clear whether they are doing illegal sanctions or legitimate activities with the consent of the country in question. China probably just wants to be a neutral supplier and stay out of it.
    - defrost 10mo ago
      Tricky, yes. Insurmountable, no. Despite the difficulty the former US administration was able to diplomatically achieve cooperation from China on this matter which bore fruit and gained traction until a seris of wild accusations and tariffs from a later administration killed a number of US / China working arrangements. See, for example, The Hidden Cost of Trump’s Trade War on China (March 18, 2025) https://www.nytimes.com/2025/03/18/opinion/trump-china-trade-war.html https://www.nytimes.com/2025/03/18/opinion/trump-china-trade... written by a former deputy assistant secretary for US international narcotics and law enforcement affairs.
- OneDeuxTriSeiGo 10mo ago
  Fun fact: The "traditional" way of making it was extracting piperine from black pepper and reacting that with nitric acid. Nowadays it's made in other more industrial scalable ways. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Piperidine#List_of_piperidine_medications https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Piperidine#List_of_piperidine_... But yes, the same base precursors (and their siblings) are used to manufacture ADHD meds (ritalin/concerta), antidepressants (paxil), insect repellents (picaridin/bayrepel), hair loss medications (rogaine), allergy meds (claritin), anti-psychotics (haldol), anti-diarrhea meds (imodium), and many others. And also PCP. So it's non-trivial to prevent. The core of the issue is that the one pot Gupta method came about in the 2000s and it made it extremely easy to manufacture fentanyl using these basic building blocks for so much of the pharma industry. Not only just making it easier to source ingredients but it took out all the steps and made the process easy as hell as well.

defrost 10mo ago

Biden era cooperation with China on the issue was at the heart of this. It wasn't about the direct supply of Fentanyl, or even (by that stage) the direct supply of Fentanyl precursor drugs .. (that gangs used to industrial shed chem lab into Fentanyl) ... this was cutting back and limiting bulk supply of the precursor precursors to shady onselling networks to starve the labs. Was going well (as per the paper) until US / China relations went in the toilet. Some of this is covered in The Hidden Cost of Trump’s Trade War on China (March 18, 2025) - https://www.nytimes.com/2025/03/18/opinion/trump-china-trade-war.html https://www.nytimes.com/2025/03/18/opinion/trump-china-trade... written by a former deputy assistant secretary for US international narcotics and law enforcement affairs. ADDENDUM: 20 page PDF of data, graphs, suppleentary material from the original 8th January 2026 Science paper Did the illicit fentanyl trade experience a supply shock? Kasey Vangelov et al (doi/10.1126/science.aea6130) here: https://www.science.org/doi/suppl/10.1126/science.aea6130/suppl_file/science.aea6130_sm.pdf https://www.science.org/doi/suppl/10.1126/science.aea6130/su...

alephnerd 10mo ago
Mexico also began enacting extremely heavy handed tariffs against China and other Asian exporters like South Korea, India, and Vietnam in 2023 onwards [0][1][2][3] in order to protect their domestic manufacturing capacity against an export-driven supply shock, which hit Mexico really badly in the 2000s [4]. > Was going well (as per the paper) until US / China relations went in the toilet Yep, but as long as Mexico continues to enact trade barriers to protect against an Asian export shock, the APIs needed for synthesis will remain difficult for organized crime to acquire. Already, cartels have begun tariff arbitraging by targeting the CEE and the Balkans as a new base for synthetic opioid operations [5][6][7], especially because Romanian [8] and other CEE gangs had been collaborating with Mexican organized crime on financial and human trafficking crimes in Mexico for over a decade now. [0] - https://www.whitecase.com/insight-alert/mexico-imposes-temporary-import-duties-25-more-588-non-fta-tariff-items https://www.whitecase.com/insight-alert/mexico-imposes-tempo... [1] - https://www.whitecase.com/insight-alert/mexico-reinstates-tariff-hikes-ranging-5-50-over-544-goods https://www.whitecase.com/insight-alert/mexico-reinstates-ta... [2] - https://www.whitecase.com/insight-alert/mexico-proposes-significant-customs-and-tariff-reforms-part-2026-economic-package https://www.whitecase.com/insight-alert/mexico-proposes-sign... [3] - https://www.whitecase.com/insight-alert/mexico-formalizes-and-expands-import-tariffs-more-1400-products-key-impacts https://www.whitecase.com/insight-alert/mexico-formalizes-an... [4] - http://international-economy.com/TIE_Sp03_Rosen.pdf http://international-economy.com/TIE_Sp03_Rosen.pdf [5] - https://www.europol.europa.eu/media-press/newsroom/news/largest-ever-synthetic-opioid-laboratory-in-poland-dismantled https://www.europol.europa.eu/media-press/newsroom/news/larg... [6] - https://balkaninsight.com/2024/07/24/fentanyl-central-europe-sees-pockets-of-rising-synthetic-opioid-use/ https://balkaninsight.com/2024/07/24/fentanyl-central-europe... [7] - https://www.brookings.edu/articles/the-foreign-policies-of-the-sinaloa-cartel-and-cjng-part-v-europes-supercoke-and-on-the-horizon-issues-and-the-middle-east/ https://www.brookings.edu/articles/the-foreign-policies-of-t... [8] - https://www.occrp.org/en/project/how-a-crew-of-romanian-criminals-conquered-the-world-of-atm-skimming https://www.occrp.org/en/project/how-a-crew-of-romanian-crim...
- defrost 10mo ago
  That absolutely played a part also. The biggest takeaway that deserves stressing over and over again is that Things Take Time .. it generally takes 18 months and longer to substantially impact global flows. The work has to be put in early, kept up in practice, and results are often credited to political actors down the road of time. TTT - Piet Hein - https://www.circlepublications.net/grooks https://www.circlepublications.net/grooks
  - alephnerd 10mo ago
    Absolutely!
stevenwoo 10mo ago
Different articles confirming this with multiple approaches and data points https://www.npr.org/2026/01/08/nx-s1-5661523/biden-made-big-gains-battling-street-fentanyl-lost-messaging-war-trump https://www.npr.org/2026/01/08/nx-s1-5661523/biden-made-big-... https://www.psypost.org/sudden-drop-in-fentanyl-overdose-deaths-linked-to-biden-era-global-supply-shock/ https://www.psypost.org/sudden-drop-in-fentanyl-overdose-dea...

cyberax 10mo ago

No, it was in doubt. Now fentanyl is produced from readily available precursors in Mexico. In underground labs: https://www.nytimes.com/2024/12/29/world/americas/inside-fentanyl-lab-mexico.html https://www.nytimes.com/2024/12/29/world/americas/inside-fen... Fentanyl is so potent that just one lab can easily satisfy all the US demand with it, around 10kg a day. That's also why it's ridiculously hard to fight, one smuggled barrel of pure product can supply the entire US for months. So no, there is no "supply shock". There's just more free Narcan (naloxone).

cogman10 10mo ago
Cocaine death decreases is the hard thing to explain with either theory, supply or naloxone. Fentanyl supply doesn't affect cocaine in any way and naloxone doesn't work on a cocaine OD. Maybe some percentage of cocaine deaths are misattributed fentanyl deaths? I also wonder if there's any link to the Oxycontin reforms. Perhaps now that prescription is reigned in, we are seeing a lot fewer oxy->fent cases which has cut back on the deaths. Or maybe it's actually that the drug dealers have gotten more careful. Drug dealers don't want to kill their clients, so maybe they've been purposefully diluting to make sure they get repeat customers.
- jddj 10mo ago
  In Europe the per kg price of cocaine has apparently halved. If that's the case in the US as well, it could be that as a result there's more cocaine in the cocaine and fewer adulterants.
  - mjanx123 10mo ago
    People don't have the money to buy drugs, deaths go down and price as well (albeit slower).
    - zdragnar 10mo ago
      For addicts, the drug is the last thing they cut back on when money is tight.

tehjoker 10mo ago

People are always talking about this precusor from China, but I have no idea what this precursor is. Are they chemicals that are useful for lots of things or is it only useful for this? Because if it is the former, then China is just selling regular ass legal chemicals because they are the worlds number 1 supplier of manufactured goods.

defrost 10mo ago
The challenge in international drug operations was not to get China to stop selling bricks to house builders to but get China to cooperate in stopping the sale of bricks to groups that only use bricks to throw through windows and at heads.
- tehjoker 10mo ago
  That’s tricky because if the US asks to stop the sale of precursors used for making medicines to an organization they name, it’s not always clear whether they are doing illegal sanctions or legitimate activities with the consent of the country in question. China probably just wants to be a neutral supplier and stay out of it.
  - defrost 10mo ago
    Tricky, yes. Insurmountable, no. Despite the difficulty the former US administration was able to diplomatically achieve cooperation from China on this matter which bore fruit and gained traction until a seris of wild accusations and tariffs from a later administration killed a number of US / China working arrangements. See, for example, The Hidden Cost of Trump’s Trade War on China (March 18, 2025) https://www.nytimes.com/2025/03/18/opinion/trump-china-trade-war.html https://www.nytimes.com/2025/03/18/opinion/trump-china-trade... written by a former deputy assistant secretary for US international narcotics and law enforcement affairs.
OneDeuxTriSeiGo 10mo ago
Fun fact: The "traditional" way of making it was extracting piperine from black pepper and reacting that with nitric acid. Nowadays it's made in other more industrial scalable ways. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Piperidine#List_of_piperidine_medications https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Piperidine#List_of_piperidine_... But yes, the same base precursors (and their siblings) are used to manufacture ADHD meds (ritalin/concerta), antidepressants (paxil), insect repellents (picaridin/bayrepel), hair loss medications (rogaine), allergy meds (claritin), anti-psychotics (haldol), anti-diarrhea meds (imodium), and many others. And also PCP. So it's non-trivial to prevent. The core of the issue is that the one pot Gupta method came about in the 2000s and it made it extremely easy to manufacture fentanyl using these basic building blocks for so much of the pharma industry. Not only just making it easier to source ingredients but it took out all the steps and made the process easy as hell as well.