The New Opium Wars

President Joe Biden sat facing China’s president Xi Jinping, each at a separate table draped in blue cloth. It was November 2022, and the two leaders were in Bali, Indonesia. They conversed amid elaborate flower arrangements on the floor and American and People’s Republic of China (PRC) flags standing in the background.1 It was their first in-person meeting since Biden had been elected president.

The meeting lasted for more than three hours. President Biden came with a full agenda: Taiwan, the war in Ukraine, human rights, Tibet, and climate change.2 One issue that he did not raise was fentanyl, which was not unusual. In all the recorded meetings and conversations President Biden and President Xi have had since 2021, the time spent on fentanyl has been almost nonexistent.3

Biden and Xi left Bali with no resolution of any agenda items. They did release a joint statement; the Biden White House noted that both leaders had agreed that weapons of mass destruction, specifically nuclear weapons, should never be used.4

But a different kind of Chinese weapon of mass destruction (WMD) is regularly exploding over the United States.

Some of its victims wander the streets hunched over like zombies, their brains fried. Others collapse on sidewalks, lie in a comalike state on the ground, or are seen “slumped over the steering wheels of cars in traffic.”5

Hundreds of thousands have just dropped dead.

This lethal weapon is fentanyl, a synthetic opioid that in 2021 alone claimed more than 67,000 lives—that is, more than American combat deaths in the wars in Iraq, Afghanistan, and Vietnam combined.6 Fentanyl is now the leading cause of death of Americans under the age of forty-five.7 It has killed more Americans in a single year than were killed in the atomic bombing of Nagasaki.8

All evidence points to fentanyl being intentionally deployed. Fentanyl is being covertly and systematically aimed at the citizens of our country by a major foreign power—the most lethal peacetime attack in human history.

Most people who die of fentanyl poisoning ingest it unintentionally; it is laced into other illegal drugs, such as marijuana or cocaine, without their knowledge.9 Many victims believe that they have purchased an FDA-approved drug such as Xanax or Vicodin, when in fact the product is a counterfeit pharmaceutical laced with fentanyl.10

Some victims, such as the musical artists Prince and Tom Petty, are famous, but most pass briefly through the news, to be remembered only by their devastated families and loved ones.11 Make no mistake: remembered or not, these casualties blight our communities—even “good neighborhoods.” About half of the people who die from fentanyl overdoses are young and of military age. As one former US government official has put it, “This is the equivalent of removing two or three divisions of Army or Marines off the rolls every year.”12

A group of West Point cadets traveled to Fort Lauderdale, Florida, for fun and sun over spring break. Four cadets picked up what they thought was cocaine, but it was laced with fentanyl. All four soon went into cardiac arrest. Three other people apparently tried to administer CPR, but in the process they exposed themselves to fentanyl and also needed to be hospitalized. Thankfully, all seven involved survived.13

“There’s never been a drug like fentanyl before. For street drugs, this absolutely destroys anything else in terms of lethality and danger,” warned Josh Bloom, a senior director of chemical and pharmaceutical research at the American Council on Science and Health.14

Jim Crotty, a former deputy chief of staff at the Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA), calls fentanyl “the most pernicious, the most devastating drug that we have ever seen.”15

Even the Mexican drug cartels, hardened and seemingly indifferent to human suffering, have a fearful respect for fentanyl. They call it El Diablo, “The Devil.”16

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.”17

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.

Some people might be aware that the precursor chemicals of fentanyl come from China. But, as we will see in the next three chapters, Beijing’s complicity in America’s fentanyl crisis is far more strategic than the mere export of chemicals. Our national leaders have access to materials that would make them fully aware of this. 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 (precursors)
• Creation of fentanyl and counterfeit pills in both Mexico and the United States
• Distribution of the deadly drug within the United States
• Facilitation of drug cartel financial transactions, and even money laundering
• Facilitation of communications networks used by the cartels to operate without detection in the United States

Indeed, we will show that some of the people involved in running these drug networks have positions of considerable power in the Chinese government or the CCP. Fentanyl shipped through Mexico is a “borrowed knife” for China that can be wielded against Americans while the country claims that it is not their weapon.

What makes this story even more troubling is that many politicians in the highest ranks of our government have access to this evidence but have remained strangely silent about China’s deep and direct involvement in unleashing this menace. They have chosen to be willfully ignorant—complicit by indifference. They have what Churchill called “vacant eyes.”

Many of their names will be familiar: President Joe Biden, Senator Mitch McConnell, Congressman Adam Schiff, former president Barack Obama, and California governor Gavin Newsom, among others. Despite the easily available, compelling evidence of Beijing’s involvement, most of our leaders carefully avoid holding China to account.

Our investigation shows that some US political and business leaders are working or investing with known members of the drug networks poisoning Americans. Apparently, the money is just too good. Compromised by commercial opportunities that benefit them or their close allies and hiding behind the excuse of not wanting to “disrupt” the US-China relationship, they effectively allow open season on Americans and sabotage our future generations.

Chinese military officers have acknowledged using drug warfare against the United States for decades, pushing first heroin, then methamphetamine, and currently fentanyl into the United States with ever-increasing lethality. And consistent with military escalation, there are plans to deploy even more potent drugs as weapons.

In the 1990s, two senior Chinese military officers analyzed the power of the US military extensively and concluded that it was futile for Beijing to try to match it. Instead, in a book called Unrestricted Warfare, they suggested the use of creative strategies to defeat the United States. Just weeks after it was released in 1999, CCP officials seized all copies of the book and removed it from circulation. Apparently, they were not angry with the authors, who would go on to have stellar careers, one retiring as a high-ranking general, the other as an influential professor in Beijing. Rather, the officials must have preferred that the contents of the book not be publicly acknowledged. Unrestricted Warfare might have disappeared completely from the public eye but for the fact that a copy was smuggled out of China and translated into English.18

Unrestricted Warfare proposed that Beijing deploy a series of nonmilitary weapons that would reimagine the tools of warfare and redefine the battlefield with “out of the box” strategies. Nothing was too extreme as far as the authors were concerned. As they revealed, “The first rule of unrestricted warfare is that there are no rules, with nothing forbidden.”19

One of the more shocking ideas was using illegal drugs as “drug warfare.”20 The authors described a plan to export and distribute illicit drugs in America, cause death, a health crisis, and social mayhem, and generally tear at the country’s social fabric.21 A few US military strategists have noted the threat. In 2014, the United States Army Special Operations Command issued a “Counter–Unconventional Warfare: White Paper” declaring that China’s method of conducting warfare against the United States included “drug warfare.”22 Others in the US government have drawn the connection as well. One report from the Naval War College stated, “China is complicit in pushing fentanyl into the United States in an effort to destabilize, undermine and weaken the fabric of America’s social and political systems.”23

“America could be attacked without anyone realizing the attacks were happening,” another former military officer observed. The strategy would be “Death by a thousand razor cuts (with some looking self-inflicted).” In 2014, John Poole, a Marine combat veteran and security consultant, essentially predicted the fentanyl crisis that was about to hit the country. “The internal ‘disaster’ that some PRC officers have advocated through drug warfare correlates with U.S. law enforcement concerns of what might follow a narcotics deluge,” he wrote in a journal for intelligence and special forces professionals. “Basically, an influx of illicit drugs would result in an increased number of addicts who would engage in theft to secure the money for their next ‘fix.’ Street combat would intensify as gangs vied for neighborhood control, and larger payoffs would further compromise the political and criminal justice systems.”24

Sound familiar? America’s total number of overdoses would reach a new high nearly every year after that prediction.25

Most lawmakers in Washington have chosen to ignore the frightening implications of Unrestricted Warfare. Reframing Communist China as a commercial and global “partner” has been too enticing—and lucrative.

Drug warfare has a special resonance among Chinese leaders. During the nineteenth-century Opium Wars, Imperial China was the target and the Chinese people the victims. Introduced to China during the seventh century, opium contributed to a national tragedy for the country more than a millennium later. British merchants, including the British East India Company, commercialized opium in China, making it inexpensive and readily accessible to Chinese people. The company became “the world’s first drug cartel.”26 The company soon controlled nearly all of world production.27 One American involved in the poisonous trade was Warren Delano, Jr., the grandfather of future president Franklin Delano Roosevelt. As far as Delano was concerned, it was a “fair, honorable, and legitimate trade.”28

Opium addiction devastated the Chinese people: at one point, an astonishing 25 percent of the population was using, if not hooked on, opium.29 Chinese officials tried several times to halt the trade, but Great Britain always responded with force, sending in the powerful Royal Navy to keep the Chinese market open to opium. Many critics in Great Britain, including William Gladstone, later a Conservative British prime minister, regarded the so-called Opium Wars as “unjust and iniquitous.”30

Communist Chinese officials today believe that the opium trade was not just about British merchants making money but was in fact an “attack by stratagem” designed to drug their country into submission.31 There is no question that the drug trade had a deleterious effect on China: at the beginning of the nineteenth century, before the opium arrived in large quantities, China was the largest economy in the world. After decades of opium addiction, the country found itself “on its last legs.”32

The damage done by the opium trade casts a long shadow in China. Even today, military officials express outrage about the way Great Britain’s Opium Wars reduced China to a minor power. They regard the opium trade as “national drug trafficking activity on probably the grandest scale in recorded history.”33 Communist Party officials insist that this history never be forgotten. Shortly after Xi Jinping became the country’s leader, he led fellow members of the Politburo to a cultural exhibit exploring Chinese progress since the Opium Wars called “The Road to Revival.”

“Every Chinese schoolchild knows that the modern drive for wealth and power is, at root, a means of avenging the Opium Wars and what followed,” noted the Economist. “How the conflict is remembered still matters very much.”34

From the perspective of President Xi and the Communist Party, what better means of rising to power and avenging the Opium Wars than by turning the tables against the Western world that it blames?

For Xi, advancing one’s national interests—to the detriment of others’—with a poisonous weapon is not only legitimate, but also patriotic. A few years ago, he had a sixty-ton granite statute, complete with surrounding gardens, built to honor his father. Barbara Demick compared it to the Kim Jong Un cult of personality. “The optics look straight out of North Korea,” she reported in the Los Angeles Times.35 Xi’s erecting the monument was to be expected—by all accounts he clearly admires his father and the way he lived his life. In one formative story of his father’s life, the fourteen-year-old boy and some classmates decided that their teacher was a counterrevolutionary. So they tried to poison him.36

*  *  *

The current fentanyl crisis has effectively been more than fifty years in the making. For decades, Communist China has been involved in the international illegal drug trade and intimately connected to the drugs flooding into the United States. And for decades, many of our leaders have remained silent, favoring commercial deals over accountability.

In 1951, just two years after the birth of Communist China, the CCP was deliberately pushing opium and heroin into Japan.37 Advancing into the United States was not far behind. A year later, large amounts of heroin coming from the People’s Republic of China arrived in New York and San Francisco harbors. Fortunately, they were seized by US authorities.38

General Matthew Ridgway had commanded the famed 82nd Airborne Division during World War II and later became the commander in chief of US forces in Japan. In 1952, he wrote in an official report, “Investigations of arrests and seizures in Japan, in 1951, proved conclusively that the Communists are smuggling heroin from China to Japan and using the proceeds to finance party activities and obtain strategic materials for China.”39

In 1955, the US Senate held hearings on the matter. Richard Deverall testified. He had served in the US Army during World War II and then become an organizer for the American Federation of Labor. He was the union’s Asia representative, which meant spending long periods in Japan, meeting with workers and Japanese government officials. He noticed the rise in drug use and addiction not only among the Japanese public, but also among American GIs stationed in the country, and investigated. In his testimony before the Senate, he confirmed that Beijing was aggressively involved in “the dirty narcotics business” and “has as one of its principal targets the country of Japan.”40 Indeed, by the early 1950s, Chinese opium exports accounted for a large portion of the opium sold in Japan.41

Other reports emerged that Beijing was actively looking for partners to sell drugs in the West. During the nineteenth century, one of the most successful distributors of opium in China had been Jardine, Matheson & Company, a Hong Kong–based British export-import company run by two Scotsmen. It was said that the firm’s partners “made their careers exporting tea from China but made their fortunes importing opium” to China.42 In the 1950s, the CCP approached the company with a lucrative export proposal. “Today it is the Chinese, or rather their government, who offer tons and tons of opium to the firm of Jardine and Matheson [to sell to the West],” explained William Jardine, a descendant of the founder who in 1957 was running the firm. “But we refuse.”43

Highly regarded senior US military officers also saw Beijing’s hard push into the drug business. Retired Marine Corps lieutenant general Victor Krulak was a commanding officer in the Pacific. He had fought heroically in World War II. From his perch, Krulak had seen plenty of intelligence about Beijing’s involvement in the drug trade. The Chinese Communists “do want hard money and opium is probably China’s greatest export staple,” he explained in 1972.44

In July 1958, Frank Bartholomew, the president of United Press International, covered a massive drug bust in Switzerland involving diplomats and counterintelligence agents. Authorities had been tipped off about the rising number of financial transactions involving Beijing’s illicit drug traffic to Europe, and the article quoted a source as saying that the activity was “for the dual purpose of helping finance the heavy costs of the spy organization and inflicting on the Western countries an intensifying problem in narcotics. The money runs into incredible figures.” Swiss officials had seized heroin from China worth $30 million to $50 million.45

By the early 1960s, Chinese narcotics exports to the United States had intensified. “Narcotics officials report that opium from Red China is being channeled into the United States at several major ports,” reported the Tampa Times in 1962. “Miami is one.”46

Beijing’s weaponization of drugs against the West became especially systematic in the jungles of Vietnam. Communist China supported the Communist insurgents not only with guns and ammunition but also with another powerful weapon to deploy against American fighting men: heroin. CCP leaders even bragged about it.

In 1965, Chinese foreign minister Chou En-lai was in Egypt for meetings with President Gamal Abdel Nasser, an occasional ally of Beijing. Chou was the second most powerful man in China after Mao Tse-tung, and he had a secret to share:

At present U.S. servicemen are experimenting with opium eating and we are helping them in this respect. We have already grown the best quality opium especially for them. . . . Do you remember those days when the Westerners forced sales of opium on us? Today we will pay them in their own coin. We will use opium to shatter the morale of the U.S. troops in Vietnam and the effects on the United States will indeed be beyond prediction.47

In fact, Beijing “devoted vast tracts of farmland in the southwestern province of Yunnan and the northwestern provinces to poppy growing.” The product was then sent to countries like Vietnam and Japan to be targeted at US troops.48

A bipartisan group in the US Senate took Beijing’s weaponization seriously and confirmed that what Chou En-lai had bragged about was in fact happening. The Senate heard testimony from General Lewis Walt, a four-star Marine general who had served in World War II and received two Navy Crosses for heroism. He had also seen combat in Korea. He had later become the assistant commandant of the US Marine Corps and was sent to Vietnam to investigate the drug problem. He testified:

In June of 1970, immediately after our Cambodian incursion, South Vietnam was flooded with heroin of remarkable purity—94 to 97 percent—which was sold at the ridiculously low price of first $1 and then $2 a vial. If profit-motivated criminals were in charge of the operation, the price made no sense at all—because no GI who wanted to get high on heroin would have batted an eyelash at paying $5, or even $10. The same amount of heroin in New York would have cost $250. The only explanation that makes sense is that the epidemic was political rather than economic in inspiration—that whoever was behind the epidemic wanted to hook as many GI’s as possible, as fast as possible, and as hard as possible.

General Walt noted that the distribution of heroin to American GIs was being carried out with military-like precision. “Everyone was agreed that the operation appeared to be highly co-ordinated and centralized,” he explained to the Senate, and that “the heroin was sold in the streets in plastic vials of similar manufacture.” They were not just some drug dealers trying to make money. “Why, if the operation was criminal in origin, did they sell stuff that was 94 to 97 percent pure, when people manage to get high in New York on 10-percent heroin? Why didn’t they dilute it?” US intelligence concluded that the heroin epidemic among US service members was linked to Chinese trafficking of narcotics.49

The US Senate even sent staffers to South Vietnam to investigate and confirmed what General Walt had reported, especially the substance’s lethal purity.50

Chou En-lai’s claim to Nasser came true—and with devastating effect. Drugs proved to be a very potent weapon to deploy against Americans. By 1971, US drug casualties in Southeast Asia were mounting.51 And not surprisingly, the morale and readiness of US forces in the region dropped dramatically. Indeed, in 1971, Congressman Robert Steele reported that the Richard Nixon administration was increasing the rate of troop withdrawals from Vietnam in part because of the high rate of heroin addiction among GIs.52

*  *  *

Though the “French connection” for heroin dominated the US market and American imagination in the early 1970s, in New York City, detectives also eavesdropped on a “Chinese connection” on US soil. In 1973, heroin in plastic bags was seized in New York, leading to the arrest of twenty members of a narcotics ring. Frank Rogers, the New York City narcotics prosecutor, declared, based on taped phone conversations, that there was a direct “Chinese connection.” Brooklyn district attorney Eugene Gold added that this was “clear and substantive evidence we have that mainland China and Hong Kong (a British colony) are being used as a means of getting heroin into the United States.” He noted that “The boss of the smuggling ring” was “an important Chinese national” who “confers with top government officials” in Beijing.53

Beijing’s involvement in the international drug trade and specifically the targeting of Americans sparked some concern in Washington, DC, among both Democrats and Republicans. Yet Dr. Stefan Possony, a military strategist at the Hoover Institution at Stanford University, noticed that despite the extensive evidence of Beijing’s involvement in the drug trade, many in Washington had become silent on the subject due to a growing desire for warmer ties with Beijing. “Beginning in the early 1960s, the subject, which originally had attracted great attention, became an ‘unsubject,’ to paraphrase Orwell,” he wrote.54

With the arrival of the Nixon administration in January 1969, doing business with China became a real possibility. The prospects of huge commercial opportunities in the closed economy with the largest population in the world enticed many.

The Nixon administration brought other pressures to bear, working to dismiss or hide evidence of Beijing’s complicity in the drug trade. In 1972, columnist Jack Anderson wrote in the Washington Post that the Nixon administration was distributing documents that were “unusually conciliatory” in tone toward the Communist Chinese, including claims that Beijing was not involved in the narcotics trade.55 His reporting was echoed by the syndicated columnist Paul Scott, who was one of the best-connected reporters in the nation’s capital at the time. Scott had been wiretapped by the CIA a decade earlier because his sources were so good and his reporting so detailed.56 Scott reported that Nixon’s push for better ties with Beijing meant that discussions about the Communist involvement in the drug trade were now strictly forbidden in the federal bureaucracy. “Government officials must not reveal any information of heroin traffic from China or the direct involvement of the Peking [Beijing] government,” he wrote.57

At the time, the Pentagon was flying reconnaissance planes over Southeast Asia to identify poppy fields in countries such as Laos and Burma. But the overflights of Burma—Beijing’s ally and a notable producer of opium—were halted at the request of Secretary of State Henry Kissinger, specifically to avoid damaging the United States’ relations with China.58