'China promised to ban a range of opioids. The U.S. should hold Beijing to it.' via PostOpinions
By Editorial Board April 4 at 7:26 PM THERE WERE 70,237 drug overdose deaths in the United States in 2017, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, a number greater than all American deaths during the entire Vietnam War. Some 28,466 of those involved fentanyl, the highly addictive opioid that is many times more potent than heroin and, accordingly, considerably more deadly.
That may now be about to change: The Beijing government, fulfilling a promise that President Xi Jinping made to President Trump in December , has announced it will ban a broad category of fentanyl-like drugs — estimated at more than 1,400 variants — as opposed to the 25 substances China had previously deigned to prohibit in piecemeal fashion.
Many have noted the historical irony in opioid imports from China fueling an addiction crisis in the West: It’s a role reversal from the Victorian Age, when China faced an opium scourge fueled by British drug traders. While of academic interest, this history was of no contemporary policy relevance and certainly no kind of reason for the current rulers in Beijing to have turned a blind eye to the problem for as long as they did.
Of course, supply interdiction cannot succeed without robust anti-addiction public-health measures in the United States . There are inherent challenges to controlling supply: China’s 160,000 chemical firms are hard to regulate, and fentanyl is highly concentrated, so a lot of the drug can be shipped in relatively small containers. Also, it’s difficult legally to ban a substance that can be altered to produce a slightly different compound without changing its narcotic properties.
Compared to its immediate predecessor, the Trump administration has essentially extracted a better-quality promise from China. Now the task is to hold Beijing to it.The Post’s View: An FDA program to prevent improper prescriptions of fentanyl had serious, devastating shortcomingsThe Post’s View: Fentanyl overdoses are killing Americans. The country must not accept business as usual.
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