Will it do any good? –

Dec. 1, 2019 – “I don’t sell any more.”

Until recently, much of the illicit fentanyl that found its way to the United States came like this: easily ordered online from a source in China and seamlessly shipped by international delivery companies, including the United States Postal Service. Fentanyl sourced from China accounted for 97 percent of the drug seized from international mail services by United States law enforcement in both the 2016 and 2017 fiscal years, according to the Drug Enforcement Administration. Now, China’s Communist government is taking steps to stop the flood, as the country’s leader, Xi Jinping, promised President Trump he would do.

After the two leaders met in Buenos Aires at the Group of 20 summit at the end of last year, the White House released a statement saying that “President Xi, in a wonderful humanitarian gesture, has agreed to designate fentanyl as a controlled substance.” … Some six months later, China did exactly that. As a result, the large, freewheeling and mostly unregulated fentanyl industry that had operated in a gray area of Chinese law appears to have stopped selling the drug for export — or at least as openly as hundreds of suppliers once did. Some of the distributors, who still can be easily found in online searches, claimed to be complying with the new rules banning the overseas sale of synthetic opioids. Others appeared to have shut down their operations, disconnecting numbers which had previously reached salespeople offering to mail the drugs to the United States — no questions asked.

Full Story @NYTimes