Chinese in court: Fentanyl process in the USA

Chinese in court: Fentanyl process in the USA

the accused and their arrest

The two accused, Wang Qingzhou and Chen Yiyi, were arrested in June 2023 as part of an undercover operation on Fiji, shown from the South Pacific island state and then arrested in the USA. Her trial began on Wednesday in the Southern District Court of New York. The indictment of 2023 is one of the first complaints against Chinese citizens and companies that are accused of smuggling precursor chemicals for the production of fentanyl to the USA. Wang and Chen are the first Chinese citizens who were arrested and delivered in such cases.

serious allegations and charges

The public prosecutor claims that the accused, together with the company for which they worked, transported more than 200 kilograms of illegal chemical predecessors to the chemical manufacturer Hubei Amarvel Biotech. This amount could be enough to supply 25 million Americans with fatal doses of fentanyl. Amarvel Biotech is one of a number of Chinese providers of such precursors, whose products are processed in laboratories that are operated by drug cartels in the USA and Mexico. According to the prosecutors, this contributes to the Drug crisis in the USA

The effects of fentanyl

fentanyl overdoses have increased significantly in recent years and have become the main cause of the main death for Americans between the ages of 18 and 45. In 2023, over 107,000 Americans died of drug overdoses, according to the government's data.

opening plea in the courtroom

Details of the undercover examination

The company and Wang as a manager of Amarvel Biotech, Chen as a marketing manager and a third employee, Anita Yang, who is on the run, face allegations that say that they have had precursor chemiicals for fentanyl production in the USA, which violates and delivered what violates federal law. Amarvel Biotech, based in the central Chinese city of Wuhan, has exported large amounts of precursor chemicals that are used to produce fentanyl and its analogue. The chemicals were sent with various tactics to disguise the programs, according to the public prosecutor.

international cooperation and challenges

In May 2023, the US criminal prosecution officers procured the undercover examination for a fentanyl analogue that had arrived in a warehouse in Los Angeles in May 2023. According to the indictment, the chemicals were sent by the defendants in the context of agreements with informants who worked with the DEA. In June, the informants organized a meeting with Wang and Chen on Fiji in order to formal the alleged monthly multitoning order of precursor chemicals. After the meeting, the two were taken into custody and transported to the USA for law enforcement. In the event of a conviction, they face at least 10 years in prison or even lifelong imprisonment.

China's reaction and charges

Although China and the USA took joint law enforcement measures to combat the flow of fentanyl, Beijing was not involved in this investigation. In a statement to CNN this week, Liu Pengyu, a spokesman for the Chinese embassy in the USA, condemned the US proceedings and accused the US criminal prosecution authorities to "catch Chinese citizens" and demanded their immediate release. Liu criticized foreign jurisdiction as "bullying" that disregarded international law.

control of the fentanylhandel

The control of the fentanyl trading provides both a source of tensions and a A few rare point between cooperation Her largely conflicting relationship. China has some of the strictest anti-drug laws worldwide, but there are critics in the USA who say that Beijing is not doing enough to monitor or regulate the purchase of Chinese ingredients for illegal drug production abroad. US legislators have also claimed that China subsidized the production of the materials used by drug smugglers to produce fentanyl.

Current developments and progress

In 2019, China intensified his measures against the production and sale of fentanyl by classifying all the associated substances as controlled narcotics, which was welcomed by Washington. However, the collaboration in the field of drug fighting between the USA and China later stalls, due to disagreements for trade, human rights and covid-19 pandemic. At the end of 2023 China and the United States took up cooperation to combat drugs. On this occasion, President Joe Biden announced a commitment from China's President XI Jinping to take action against companies that produce precursor chemicals. Since then, China has captured earlier efforts to tighten the regulation and reduce the production of fentanyl -related chemicals.

However, Chinese authorities have also made a statement that the control of the production of precursor chemicals can solve the problem, since manufacturers can make small changes to chemical compounds in order to synthesize related connections and thus be able to circumvent regulations. In an interview with CNN in September, Hua Zhendong, a deputy director of drug analyzes at the Chinese Ministry of Public Security, described the "tedious efforts" of the country to control fentanyl and its success in reducing the production and export of completed fentanyl products from China. "However, it is fundamentally impossible to completely suppress the illegal production by controlling precursor chemicals," said Hua. "The most fundamental problem is still reducing demand."