Fentanyl Crisis Escalates In U.S. Workplaces As China Fuels Supply Chain

Thanks to China, the use of fentanyl at the workplace in America is soaring.

Sen. Joni Ernst (R-IA) said back in February 2023 that China was conducting warfare against the United States by intentionally flooding the country with fentanyl, declaring, “The Chinese are selling these precursor chemicals into Mexico. Then the Mexican cartels are working on making the fentanyl and distributing up into the United States. I think that the Chinese are intentionally poisoning America.”

A National Drug Threat Assessment from the DEA said that the Mexican drug cartels “use a combination of methods to obtain chemicals used for fentanyl production in Mexico, primarily from sources originating in China, including purchases made on the open market, smuggling chemicals hidden in legitimate commercial shipments, mislabeling shipments to avoid controls and the attention of law enforcement, and diversion from the chemical and pharmaceutical industries.”

“In randomized workplace drug tests, the presence of the synthetic opioid fentanyl was 1.13% in 2024. That is up from 0.91% in 2023 and double the rate in 2020, according to a recent analysis of more than eight million drug tests by Quest Diagnostics,” The Wall Street Journal reported, adding, “Surprise random tests are a clearer indication of opioid use among workers than pre-employment screening, which subjects can prepare for ahead of time and even game to achieve negative results. … The opioid epidemic has been a persistent concern for workplaces, especially in occupations in the construction, mining and transportation industries.”

Peter Schweizer, author of “Blood Money: Why the Powerful Turn a Blind Eye While China Kills Americans,” said the fentanyl trade starts in China, asserting, “They’re the senior partner. The drug cartels are really the junior partner in the fentanyl trade.” He continued, “The Mexican drug cartels now launder their money in Chinese state-owned banks, and, according to our government, they use Chinese students in the United States on education visas to do this.”

In April 2024, former U.S. Attorney General Bill Barr told the House Select Committee on the Strategic Competition Between the United States and the Chinese Communist Party, “The [People’s Republic of China] is the source of the fentanyl that is slaughtering Americans. China produces nearly all the illicit fentanyl precursors used and the fentanyl introduced into the United States. These are the indispensable ingredients that drive the fentanyl trade. There is no practical alternative for anywhere near the volume of precursors necessary to fuel this trade. Simply put, without China’s production and export of fentanyl and fentanyl precursors, there would be no fentanyl crisis in the United States and the mass slaughter would effectively stop.”