Experts believe breakthrough in US fentanyl crisis may have started in China | Fentanyl

As Donald Trump heads to Beijing this week, fentanyl and its role in China’s supply chain remain a persistent hardpoint in bilateral relations.

At the UN meeting in March, the USA again blamed china While China has said it has failed to stop the chemical industry from selling precursors needed to make powerful synthetic opioids, China has argued that the United States bears responsibility for its domestic drug problem.

But there are growing signs that the fentanyl crisis in the United States has now reached a turning point, and some experts believe interventions in China are playing a significant role.

“There was a supply shock: the purity of fentanyl dropped,” said Stanford University professor Keith Humphreys. “The question is From where Was there a supply shock? “Most indicators point to China.”

Back in the White House, Trump made fentanyl a foreign policy priority, quickly designating criminal groups smuggling fentanyl as foreign terrorist organizations and imposing tariffs on countries in the supply chain (including China, a major source of fentanyl precursors, many of which are essential chemicals with legitimate uses).

But by the summer of 2023 — during the Biden administration — overdose deaths nationally had already begun to decline. By November 2025, they were in decline. more than a third.

Researchers are still trying to uncover the factors behind the decline, but there is a theory put forward by Humphreys and his co-authors. last work The report published by Science links this to interventions in the fentanyl supply chain in China that could cause a long-term disruption.

The authors point to a dramatic decline in the purity of fentanyl seized by U.S. law enforcement from May 2023 to the end of 2024 (the most recent publicly available data), which correlates with a decline in overdose deaths.

Canada, a different market for fentanyl, experienced a similar drop in purity, suggesting the reason may be due to where they both source their precursors: China.

The idea that the flow of pioneers is disrupted is supported by the following: Reports for 2024 While cartel cooks have difficulty finding them, new and strange adulterers Its appearance in fentanyl on US streets suggests that these cooks may have tried alternative synthesis routes.

But there are big caveats. First, it is difficult to determine which of China’s self-reported interventions may be responsible. It’s also unclear whether the drop in purity is actually causing the drop in overdose deaths.

However, Liu Pengyu, a spokesman for the Chinese embassy in Washington, said in a statement that China was pleased to see fentanyl overdose deaths decreasing and noted that the US government’s 2025 National Drug Threat Assessment “implies that the Chinese government’s efforts are effective.” [a] Contribution to solving the fentanyl problem in the USA”.

Henrietta Levin, China director at Biden’s National Security Council, said her former colleagues have seen Science newspaper’s pressure on China working. “I think China can do more,” Levin said. “But what they did was important.”

It is likely that other supply-side interventions will be on the agenda at this week’s summit.

Ideally, these would include China changing its laws to make it easier to investigate drug trafficking and the commerce ministry taking more steps to truly rein in the behavior of chemical companies, Levin said.

“A lot of this has to do with sanctions,” Levin said. “China announces export controls [on various fentanyl precursors]and this is important. “But Chinese chemical companies are gauging how serious the government is about enforcing these restrictions.”

But history shows that as long as demand exists, supply shocks are always temporary and can have unpredictable effects or even make things worse.

Actually it only happened after that China bans fentanyl across the board in 2019 He said the supply chain evolved to loop Mexican cartels, who began importing precursors from China and then transported the finished product across the U.S.-Mexico border, almost completely replacing the previous heroin trade.

“There’s a kind of myopia here,” said Nabarun Dasgupta, director of the University of North Carolina’s opioid data laboratory. “Then the geopolitics backfired.”

Additional research by Yu-Chen Li