BEIJING — American and Chinese officials had “frank and honest discussions” about stemming the flow of fentanyl into the U.S., but Beijing could do much more to help stem what has been called the worst drug crisis in U.S. history, the head of the White House delegation at the high-level talks told NBC News on Tuesday.
Jen Daskal, a deputy homeland security adviser, said in an exclusive interview that Day One of two days of meetings with a new counternarcotics working group in Beijing had been “an important step forward in our relationship.” They were the first formal high-level talks the two global powers had held on the issue in years as their relations deteriorated amid disputes over a range of issues including trade, technology, human rights and the status of Taiwan.
“What we hope that today will do will be to launch continued cooperation so that we can share information and see more progress,” Daskal said.
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Speaking before the group’s inauguration on Tuesday, Chinese Minister of Public Security Wang Xiaohong said the two delegations had “reached common understanding on the work plan” and that he hoped the two sides could “enhance and expand cooperation to provide more positive energy for stable, sound and sustainable China-U.S. relations.”
Fentanyl, an extremely lethal synthetic opioid, is at the center of a drug crisis that has devastated communities across the United States. Of the more than 70,000 overdose deaths involving synthetic opioids in 2021, the vast majority were fentanyl-related, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
In 2019, China permanently classified all variants of fentanyl as controlled substances and took other measures to stem the flow of finished fentanyl from China to the U.S., which has not seized any shipments since then. Instead, U.S. officials say, China is now the primary source of precursor chemicals that are synthesized into fentanyl by drug cartels in Mexico, which then smuggle the final product into the U.S.
The resumption of U.S.-China counternarcotics cooperation was one of the outcomes of the November meeting in California between President Joe Biden and Chinese President Xi Jinping, their first encounter in a year. After slowing to almost nothing, cooperation was officially suspended by China in August 2022 in response to then-House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s visit to Taiwan, an island democracy that Beijing claims as its territory.
Since the Biden-Xi meeting, Daskal said, China has issued a notice to domestic companies warning them against illicit sales of precursor chemicals and imposing new enforcement measures. It is also once again submitting information about suspicious shipments and suspected trafficking to the International Narcotics Control Board.
But there is much more that can be done, Daskal said.
“We will know if it works if we start seeing the supply of precursor drugs diminish, if we start seeing the supply of pill presses and other equipment diminish,” she said.
China counters that the U.S. is mainly to blame for the crisis, and that American officials aren’t doing enough to reduce demand.
“The fentanyl crisis in the United States is not manufactured by China; its roots lie within the country itself,” Yu Haibin, one of China’s top narcotics control officials, said in an interview last week, adding that China nonetheless empathized with Americans’ drug-related suffering.
“The Chinese people are willing to actively participate in global drug control efforts and help the American people overcome the harm of drugs,” said Yu, who is deputy director-general of the Ministry of Public Security’s Narcotics Control Bureau and deputy secretary-general of the National Narcotics Control Commission.
Daskal said that U.S. officials and their Chinese counterparts had discussed “the fact that this is a problem of both demand and supply, and you can’t tackle one without the other.”
“Fentanyl is different to other forms of drugs that we have seen before in that the demand is being fueled by the traffickers,” she said, adding that traffickers were hiding fentanyl in other drugs to get their customers addicted “so they want it more and more.”
Many of the constantly shifting precursor chemicals are “dual use,” meaning they also have legal purposes and are difficult to restrict, “but that doesn’t mean that they should be heading to the hands of organized crime actors who explicitly intend to produce fentanyl from them, something that the suppliers in China very frequently know,” said Vanda Felbab-Brown, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution in Washington and…
Read More: U.S. and China hold high-level talks on the fentanyl crisis