Elliptic data leads to the shutdown of the two largest online criminal marketplaces of all time, revealing the vulnerability of centralized platforms like Telegram for illicit activities.
Also, what I’ve heard is fewer drug dealers buy actual fentanyl from China and most buy precursor chemicals and manufacture the drug closer to where it’s being distributed since it’s both cheaper and less likely to attract scrutiny. Here in Canada we’ve had multiple fentanyl “super labs” getting busted with many more we haven’t yet caught, and most of that fentanyl is for distribution within Canada with very little making it even to the US let alone overseas. Why does China sell precursors to fentanyl? Because they’re also used in benign industrial processes that produce many of the chemicals you use every day in your life and it’s not exactly obvious to the vendor which orders are for making illegal drugs and which orders are for making over the counter drugs or something mundane. And illegal drug production isn’t actually that big in scale compared to the industrial scales that legal chemicals are produced at so the vast majority of their orders are probably legitimate. Might as well go after the Chinese companies selling lab glassware and hot plates too. Are there more things that all countries including China can do to reduce global drug production? Of course there are, there always are. But I haven’t personally seen strong evidence that China is deliberately flooding the West with fentanyl as part of some plot to kill white people or something, at worse I could see the argument being made that they don’t really care if it’s sold overseas and beyond their jurisdiction, but even then I personally think it’s more of a case of it being difficult to tell which shipments are going to drug dealers and which ones are legitimate.
Also, what I’ve heard is fewer drug dealers buy actual fentanyl from China and most buy precursor chemicals and manufacture the drug closer to where it’s being distributed since it’s both cheaper and less likely to attract scrutiny. Here in Canada we’ve had multiple fentanyl “super labs” getting busted with many more we haven’t yet caught, and most of that fentanyl is for distribution within Canada with very little making it even to the US let alone overseas. Why does China sell precursors to fentanyl? Because they’re also used in benign industrial processes that produce many of the chemicals you use every day in your life and it’s not exactly obvious to the vendor which orders are for making illegal drugs and which orders are for making over the counter drugs or something mundane. And illegal drug production isn’t actually that big in scale compared to the industrial scales that legal chemicals are produced at so the vast majority of their orders are probably legitimate. Might as well go after the Chinese companies selling lab glassware and hot plates too. Are there more things that all countries including China can do to reduce global drug production? Of course there are, there always are. But I haven’t personally seen strong evidence that China is deliberately flooding the West with fentanyl as part of some plot to kill white people or something, at worse I could see the argument being made that they don’t really care if it’s sold overseas and beyond their jurisdiction, but even then I personally think it’s more of a case of it being difficult to tell which shipments are going to drug dealers and which ones are legitimate.