Fentanyl: Chinese authorities face deadly adversary that changes so quickly it defies definition by the law
- Created by chemistry, driven by greed, made in China: it caused 28,500 fatalities in the US last year and its analogues tie narcotics authorities in knots for months
In a race between law enforcement and narco-criminals, chemistry is king and the drug makers have numbers on their side.
Between 2012 and 2015, six fentanyl-related drugs were developed in China for the black market. In 2016, that number was 66, and in the following year 34 more were concocted.
Chinese enforcement agencies cannot get the upper hand when a market expands at such speed and creates drugs that the law takes months to define as controlled substances so they can begin to try to get them off the streets.
Even with laws in place to control narcotics and tough punishments that include the death penalty, China is outpaced or bypassed by laboratory-produced psychoactive substances such as fentanyl and its analogues.
Fentanyl, 50 times stronger than heroin, and some of its much stronger analogues – drugs that are chemically similar to it – have been blamed by the US Centres for Disease Control and Prevention for 28,466 fatal overdoses last year, about 60 per cent of all opioid overdose deaths in the US.
Cracking down on fentanyl production has been discussed by Chinese President Xi Jinping and his US counterpart Donald Trump several times but they are fighting an uphill battle.
Criminal law in China put widely known drugs such as heroin, opium, methamphetamine and other narcotic and psychotropic substances on the control list which Beijing started in 2005.