(New York Post) China already is waging war with the US, but not with guns — with poison. In his new book, “Blood Money,” Peter Schweizer explains how Communist China mass produces and distributes fentanyl, a chemical 30 to 50 times as powerful as heroin, to poison Americans. As this excerpt shows, the Chinese government actively uses fentanyl as a weapon to destabilize our society.
While we debate domestic politics to address the fentanyl crisis, the reality is that Beijing is deeply involved at every stage of the drug’s production and distribution in the United States.
It’s little wonder that in 2019, some senior officials at the US Department of Homeland Security asked for fentanyl to be classified as a “weapon of mass destruction.”
How did the most dangerous drug ever created become a household word, and scourge, in America?
Not by accident, but by deliberate design. Beijing’s hand can be found in every stage of the poison’s spread in North America.
Based on leaked US national security documents, Mexican government hacked emails or correspondence, and Chinese corporate records, we know that the fentanyl operation is under Chinese control from start to finish, including:
• Production of the basic chemicals needed to make it
Most of the pharmaceutical ingredients needed to produce the synthetic cocktail known as fentanyl are produced in China.
In the northern city of Shijiazhuang, west of Beijing, chemical companies churn out such ingredients. A highly militarized city boasting some 11 military facilities including several command schools, military hospitals, and medical facilities, it is also a government-designated national development zone. So the companies producing the fentanyl chemicals get tax credits.
Some 40% of the production of this chemical comes from this city alone. Wuhan, now synonymous with COVID-19, is another big production center of fentanyl components.
• Creation of fentanyl and counterfeit pills in both Mexico and the United States
The Chinese triads began forging relationships with the Mexican drug cartels and quickly became business partners with them. The cartels started to mix fentanyl with their heroin. Fentanyl production proved to be so lucrative that “El Chapo,” the infamous head of the Sinaloa Cartel, quickly shifted from producing heroin and cocaine to fentanyl.
From the perspective of the Chinese triads and their allies in Beijing, routing the drugs through Mexico not only made logistical sense but also provided Beijing a measure of plausible deniability. The borrowed knife. The drugs were coming from Mexico, not China, right?
A similar operation, but on a smaller scale, occurred north of the border in Canada. Chinese triads established laboratories along the US border in British Columbia to produce fentanyl in Canada, smuggle it into the United States, and ship it abroad.
Once the fentanyl is synthesized, it is pressed into pills to be smuggled across the border. The pills need to look like real prescription drugs. Who do you think provides the pill presses?
In April 2020, the DOJ sent out an alert to law enforcement agencies with a blunt headline: “Chinese Pill Presses Are Key Components for Illegally Manufactured Fentanyl.” It noted how China smuggled pill presses into the US and Mexico, often claiming they were “machine parts.”
The DOJ noted the “relatively moderate pricing” of $1,000 per pill press — essentially at cost. Why are Chinese companies not charging a huge markup to sell the pill presses to the drug cartels?
Chinese pill press manufacturers are required by US law to alert the DEA when they ship pill presses to the United States so federal authorities can track those who might be illegally producing drugs. But the Chinese companies simply ignore the law — with devastatingly lethal consequences in America. And Beijing does not punish them for doing so.
• Distribution of the deadly drug within the United States
The Zheng drug syndicate, or cartel, operated a large fentanyl distribution ring in the American Midwest and bragged to drug dealers that it could openly “synthesize nearly any” narcotic, including fentanyl. In 2018, the DOJ indicted the cartel leadership in China. But despite arrest warrants, China allowed the cartel’s leaders to continue to live freely in Shanghai.
An important player in the Zheng drug syndicate was a Chinese Canadian scientist named Bin Wang. On the surface, Wang operated as a legitimate businessman out of a nondescript warehouse in Woburn, Massachusetts, just north of Boston. Wang sold chemicals to National Institutes of Health research projects.
But behind the legal facade, Wang was running a Zheng syndicate narcotics distribution hub. Wang’s companies received parcels from China with narcotics smuggled within bulk shipments of legitimate chemicals from Wang’s Chinese companies. The fentanyl and other drugs were then separated into individual parcels for his US distributors.
Wang advised his employees to “heat seal” the fentanyl into “foil bags”; falsely label the parcels with the name of safe, legal chemicals; then ship them across the United States.
After the Zheng network was broken up by US law enforcement, Wang was indicted and charged with nearly a dozen crimes. He received a sentence of six years in prison.
Wang’s case exemplifies the symbiosis between drug cartel members and the Chinese government. While distributing fentanyl in the United States, Wang worked for Beijing to create a computerized platform to track chemical shipments worldwide, which meant flying to China monthly, in part to meet with Chinese government officials to discuss his progress.
Wang was also the head of the Nanjing University Alumni Association for the Boston area. Although the association sounds innocent enough, it functions as if it is a United Front group and uses its US-acquired knowledge to serve Beijing’s technological needs.
