China is reportedly waging a very lethal irregular warfare against the US by using the Mexican drug cartels to traffic ‘deadly’ fentanyl, targeting America’s next generation and unseating the US as the number one economic and military superpower in the world.
Derek Maltz, the former chief of special operations of the Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA), told Just the News, a Washington DC-based media outlet, that the Biden administration has strong evidence of how China supplies the precursor ingredients for fentanyl to the cartels and the locations of production labs in Mexico.
However, the administration has failed to prevent cartels from operating across the US southern border to move drugs and earn billions of dollars trafficking humans to create new cash flow for their fentanyl supply networks, according to Maltz.
“We have synthetic drugs being made in these labs in Mexico. We know where a lot of the labs are. We have to get way more aggressive, and we have to work with the Mexicans and hold them accountable to shut down these labs,” Maltz said in an interview with Just the News.
“We also must shut down the chemical flow, the precursors coming out of China. That’s why the cartels now are producing such large amounts of these synthetic drugs,” he continued.
According to Maltz, the Mexican Drug Cartels must be declared foreign terrorist organizations to give the US government more tools to fight fentanyl trafficking.
Maltz argues that China’s involvement in fentanyl trafficking must be viewed as part of its larger national strategy to supersede the US in terms of economic and military power.
“China has pushed their unrestricted warfare. They’re using fentanyl to kill our future generation,” Maltz said.
“They’re using the cartels as a proxy to destroy and destabilize our country,” he added. “And it’s working very well.”
Fentanyl Drug Threat To The United States
The DEA describes fentanyl as the deadliest drug threat facing the US, as it is highly addictive and fatal. According to the agency, fentanyl is 50 times more potent than heroin, and just two milligrams of fentanyl, the small amount that fits on the tip of a pencil, is considered a potentially deadly dose.
Last month, the agency announced the seizure of 50.6 million fentanyl-laced, fake prescription pills and more than 10,000 pounds of fentanyl powder in 2022.
The DEA Laboratory estimates that these seizures represent more than 379 million potentially deadly doses of fentanyl in 2022, which reportedly represents a 94 percent increase from 2019.
In 2021, more than 107,000 US citizens died of drug overdoses, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention estimate. This number roughly indicates one US overdose death every 5 minutes.
According to experts, the COVID-19 pandemic added to the problems as lockdowns and other restrictions isolated those with drug addictions and made treatment harder.
Also, a study by Stanford University in the Lancet medical journal warned that the US opioid overdose deaths could reach 1.2 million by 2029.
Maltz said that China utilizes social media outlets as crucial marketing tools to glamorize the use of fentanyl by the youth of America. He noted that fentanyl-laced pills could be ordered on Snapchat and social media, then delivered to “the house like it’s a pizza.”
The DEA explains that these pills are made to look like authentic prescription medications such as OxyContin®, Percocet®, and Xanax®; however, they only contain filler and fentanyl and are often deadly.
The two major producers of fentanyl are the Sinaloa and Jalisco (CJNG) cartels in Mexico.
Chinese Involvement In Drug Trafficking Into The US
Maltz began to observe Chinese involvement in the drug trade targeting the US about a decade ago while he worked for DEA in Mexico. He noted that initial Chinese efforts entailed less lethal synthetic opioids. However, eventually, it evolved into a more deadly fentanyl concoction in the last few years.
“They now have turned over the dirty work to the Mexican cartels,” Maltz said.
Maltz is not alone in raising the alarm about fentanyl and the role of China and the cartels in the drug crisis in the United States.
“There is enough fentanyl coming over the border to kill every American multiple time over,” Republican Congresswoman Mary Miller, from Illinois, told Just the News recently. “I would say that we’re under a terrorist chemical attack.”
Similarly, the US Commission on Combating Synthetic Opioid Trafficking last year warned that China’s most deadly threat to the US at present was not its defense build-up or military aggression. Instead, it’s the role it plays in the fentanyl supply chain.
The co-chair of the commission, a Democrat Congressman David Trone from Maryland, told Politico last year that China is primarily the lone supplier of the precursor chemicals and pre-precursor chemicals that are shipped from the country to Mexico.
“They know it’s being shipped to Mexico; it’s being done by Chinese middlemen who are selling it directly to the Mexican cartels, where it is being turned into fentanyl, which is then being mixed into other drugs like counterfeit pills,” Trone said. “… It is coming into the US by the hundreds of millions of pills, and the chain all starts in China.”
The Biden administration has raised its concerns with China but has not taken any direct punitive measures. Meanwhile, China has denied any intentional involvement in the fentanyl crisis. However, most US officials do not believe China’s claims.
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