Collaboration key to solving China-fuelled opioid epidemic, US officials say
Testifying at House hearing about ways to reduce imports of fentanyl, law enforcement officials avoid the tough talk used by Donald Trump
United States law enforcement officials reaffirmed the Trump administration’s claim on Thursday that synthetic opioids produced in China are fuelling an opioid epidemic in the US responsible for the deaths of tens of thousands of people every year.
At the same time, though, they took pains to distance themselves from some of the recent heated talk on the issue and expressed cautious optimism that collaboration between US and Chinese drug control agencies would help counter the crisis.
Fentanyl, a synthetic opioid around 50 times more potent than heroin, is being “shipped into the US via postal or express mail from China”, said Paul Knierim of the US Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA), speaking at a hearing convened by the House of Representatives’ Foreign Affairs subcommittee.
Knierim, the deputy chief of operations at the DEA’s Office of Global Enforcement, cited the influx of synthetic opioids like fentanyl from China – as well as Mexico – as the primary reason behind the increase in opioid overdoses the US has witnessed in recent years.
Overdoses in the US attributable to fentanyl more than doubled between 2015 and 2016 to almost 19,500 deaths, compared to an overall rise in drug overdoses of 21 per cent over the same period, according to statistics from the National Centre for Health Statistics at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.