[whiddershins]

What I think is odd is that it is so outrageous and conspiratorial sounding to even consider malicious intent on the part of the Chinese government.

I’m not saying I have any idea what the real impactful decisions that fuel this problem even are, much less who is making them, triple much less what their intention is.

I’m not sure it is clear what is really fueling the opioid epidemic, many theories of causation are plausible.

But it seems hopelessly naive to discard outright the possibility that aggressive intention by the Chinese Government is a factor here.

Countries have done much, much, worse to each other (and their own people) in pursuit of various strategic objectives throughout all of recorded history. Why should we flat out assume that has somehow fundamentally changed?

[SkyMarshal]

I am not a medical or public health professional, but my understanding from various medical podcasts [1] and reporting is, the source of the epidemic is over-prescription of opioids as a cure-all, even for non-physical pain and psychological maladies like anxiety. Similar to over prescription of antibiotics, except that opioids are addictive.

China didn’t cause this, we did, but there are suppliers in China cashing in on it. But so are other suppliers in the US and elsewhere.

[1]: http://freakonomics.com/podcast/opioids-part-1/

[1]:https://sph.umich.edu/podcast/season1/opioids.html

[datashow]

Not really that simple, medicine supply can change doctors' behavior. And massive amount of fentanyl are illegally smuggled into the US. You can't simply pick a middle point in the chain of events and claim that point is the cause.

[DiogenesKynikos]

It's pretty serious to accuse a foreign government of intentionally helping in the poisoning/killing of your citizens. Especially in the current atmosphere of growing anti-Chinese paranoia in the US (which predates the Coronavirus outbreak), people shouldn't be throwing around such accusations without solid evidence.

In the article, Ben Westhoff gives a much less conspiratorial explanation of why China was slow to crack down on fentanyl:

> China does not have a fentanyl crisis nearly the scope that the US does, or Canada, also has a really big problem. And so to a lot of people, this is why China hasn't really cracked down on its fentanyl industry, because its own people aren't dying from it. And so the way the Chinese government works is, fentanyl is illegal there, but it's not so much just the laws on the books, it's what resources the government dedicates to cracking down on different problems. And so when it comes to meth, which is a huge problem among Chinese citizens, the government has really focused on trying to stamp it out, take drug dealers down, disrupt operations. But when it comes to fentanyl being made there, that's just not the case.

[Eoan]

How many governments has the US sold military weapons to?

Even the Islamic State (Isis) was mostly using US-produced bullets.

[RealityVoid]

Possibly because of a lack of obvious advantage this would bring to China. I can not fathom what they could hope to gain by planning this.

[mperham]

You should read about the Opium Wars. Britain literally went to war with China so they could sell opium to the Chinese. Pretty clear parallels here.

[dntbnmpls]

The parallel would be US = Britain and China = China. US is running a trade deficit with china like britain was running a trade deficit with china in the 1800s.

If the US invaded china and forced china to buy opium to offset the trade imbalance, then the parallel would apply.

I don't remember china invading the US. And china isn't forcing drugs on the US, no more than mexico or south america is forcing drugs on the US. There is demand for drugs in the US. That is the problem.

And the slow but recent drug legalization around the country and the glamorization of drugs in the media isn't going to help.

[whiddershins]

Do you feel you have a good sense of what things “help” the Chinese government?

Do you feel clear on what their short, medium, and long term objectives are?

I’m sure I don’t.

It seems obvious there is at least some potential benefit to causing your biggest competitor for military and economic influence a bunch of costly problems ... but I truly have no idea what any of these leaders are thinking about.

[DeonPenny]

Motivation seem the most obvious think. The opium wars and they say openly they don't like the west and are openly competing with them

[dajohnson89]

precedent: opium wars?

[frozenport]

Ironic reversal of a supposed century of humiliation. A weakening of a hostile hegemony?

[philipkglass]

There was (is?) a substantial online trade in psychoactive "research chemicals" starting in the early 2000s -- stimulants, hallucinogens, cannabinoids, and anything else you can imagine. They were recreational drugs that were not yet formally scheduled in many countries [1], often resembling existing molecules, sometimes mined from academic literature or from enthusiasts experimenting with unpublished analogues based on intuition or SAR predictions. This started out in the US and Europe. Operation Web Tryp [2] is the first major action I recall against these vendors. European countries without the equivalent of the Analogue Act continued to play whack-a-mole against new substances, which meant that vendors could keep going as long as they didn't foul afoul of scheduling updates or of the much-blunter American Drug Enforcement Agency.

Around 10 years ago, maybe a bit earlier, risk-averse European psychonauts started outsourcing the synthesis of novel molecules to labs in China, much like larger pharma research organizations were doing for basic synthetic work. Mine the literature, come up with some targets and proposed synthesis outline, outsource to Chinese vendors. The only work necessary on the buyer's end was to run analytical chemistry to ensure they were getting what was planned, then consume the drug to see how it behaves in vivo. Some of the more successful drugs that were sampled this way escaped the tight knit psychonaut groups and started popping up as items of commerce; does anyone remember the explosion of JWH series synthetic cannabinoids? (Fortunately, those strange brews seem less popular in the US since states started legalizing ordinary cannabis.)

The first really alarming substance I saw coming from these small custom synthesis vendors just has the code name U-47700 [3]; it's an opioid with a weird structure, never tested in humans until gray and dark market vendors put it on the map. I also saw opioid dependent chemists researching modifications of the OTC drug Loperamide [4] so that it could cross the blood brain barrier and satisfy their craving.

This is all a long winded way of saying that Chinese vendors were deliberately sought out by self-experimenting psychonauts and people with drug dependencies years before news reports of Chinese fentanyl in the US. It didn't start with opioids, but it eventually ended there. The drug flow from Chinese laboratories started as a Western "pull" rather than a Chinese "push." Opioids were also among the last drugs to start flowing in volume. That's why I think that attributing the drug flow to a Chinese government plan for Opium War revenge is ridiculous.

I had access to invite-only psychonaut/chemist forums for years. I tried visiting one of them just now and it's now just a domain landing page. So no citations for the chronology of my story, sorry, but major parts of it should be corroborated by what you can find on more open forums like Bluelight.

[1] Though the Federal Analogue Act in the US meant that novel "fun" compounds being sold for human consumption were illegal without any new legislation being needed.

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Web_Tryp

[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/U-47700

[4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Loperamide

[oceanghost]

I was lucky enough to be around for the MXE days, and I'd like to say you're absolutely correct.

The only thing that is odd to me is what is legal and illegal to manufacture in China. The common "reason" for MXE being unavailable is that it is no longer legal in China, yet, fentanyl is?

[dragonwriter]

> That's why I think that attributing the drug flow to a Chinese government plan for Opium War revenge is ridiculous.

But that conclusion doesn't even approximately follow from the preceding narrative, which just as easily could be seen as lending credence to the hypothesis you use it to reject, since it provides a very clear explanation as to how both the ground was laid off such an effort to be successful and how the Chinese government would become aware of that opportunity.

(The “Opium War” revenge is probably needlessly romanticized, even if the Chinese government did deliberately act on the opportunity, the motivation (even if the Opium War was part of the inspiration) was probably more prosaic geopolitical advantage by weakening rivals with costly internal problems, not revenge.

[woah]

The bath salts were a similar story, right?

[philipkglass]

Right, "bath salts" contained cathinone drugs that were initially obscure and unregulated in many countries, so they served as temporarily legal substitutes for amphetamine type stimulants.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Substituted_cathinone

[yumcimil]

Yes, but it's much more plausible that a fucked healthcare system does it on its own.

[beenBoutIT]

Our backwards restrictions on what chemicals adults can and can't consume are to blame for this. When the US changes it's laws so that adults can legally buy opiates if they want to take opiates no one outside of medical professionals will have any interest in fentanyl.