| ▲ | defrost a day 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... 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/su... | |||||||||||||||||
| ▲ | stevenwoo a day ago | parent | next [-] | ||||||||||||||||
Different articles confirming this with multiple approaches and data points https://www.npr.org/2026/01/08/nx-s1-5661523/biden-made-big-... https://www.psypost.org/sudden-drop-in-fentanyl-overdose-dea... | |||||||||||||||||
| ▲ | alephnerd a day ago | parent | prev [-] | ||||||||||||||||
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-tempo... [1] - https://www.whitecase.com/insight-alert/mexico-reinstates-ta... [2] - https://www.whitecase.com/insight-alert/mexico-proposes-sign... [3] - https://www.whitecase.com/insight-alert/mexico-formalizes-an... [4] - http://international-economy.com/TIE_Sp03_Rosen.pdf [5] - https://www.europol.europa.eu/media-press/newsroom/news/larg... [6] - https://balkaninsight.com/2024/07/24/fentanyl-central-europe... [7] - https://www.brookings.edu/articles/the-foreign-policies-of-t... [8] - https://www.occrp.org/en/project/how-a-crew-of-romanian-crim... | |||||||||||||||||
| |||||||||||||||||