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.

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_...

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.

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.