Supply-Side Drug Policies are Paramount
America must do more to stop the flow of deadly drugs into the country.
Two hundred years ago the smuggling of ever increasing amounts of opium into China led to widespread addiction, harm to individuals and communities, a weakening of the Chinese government and its military, and an imbalance of trade. Efforts by China to curtail the flooding of their country with opium by Western traders led to two Opium Wars with Britain, which China lost. The resulting unequal treaties forced China to legalize the opium trade, open its ports to the West, pay reparations, and cede Hong Kong to the British.
Chinese students now learn that China must never again let itself become weak and vulnerable to other countries.
Today, although drug overdose deaths in the United States may have peaked, a matter subject to regional variance and much debate, overdoses still kill over 100,000 Americans each year. Overdose deaths due to fentanyl, a powerful synthetic opioid, is now the number one cause of death for young American adults ages 18 to 45. Nearly all of these recent overdose deaths are from synthetic drugs produced by drug cartels in Mexico using raw ingredients obtained from China, often by way of shipments to the United States that are later diverted to Mexico and then converted into precursors to make synthetic drugs like meth and fentanyl, which now flood our country.
Yes, the pharmaceutical industry spurred on an opioid addiction epidemic years ago with misinformation about the safety of drugs such as time-released oxycodone. But the current addiction crisis is no longer primarily fed by misuse or diversion of pharmaceutical products. It is fueled by illicit and powerful synthetic street drugs.
To address our present addiction crisis, we must continue to focus our efforts on the primary evidence-based tools we have in our domestic drug policy toolbox—namely prevention, enforcement, treatment, recovery support, individual harm reduction, and community harm reduction.
At the same time, we must reduce the supply of deadly synthetic drugs coming into our country.
Some assert there is little to no point in doing so. But they are wrong. These kinds of targeted supply reduction efforts can have meaningful and significant impacts, especially when dealing with synthetic drugs.
Focusing on the raw ingredients feeding illicit synthetic drug labs operated by drug cartels is not a new idea. We have done it before, with great success. We did this 15 years ago with regard to meth, and 40 years ago with regard to quaaludes. More recently, through policies and negotiations initiated by the Obama administration and implemented by the Trump administration, China curtailed carfentanil, an even more powerful synthetic opioid that was causing a lot of death in our county, leading to a decline in overdose deaths.
The Mexico Challenge
Border control also plays a role, but in a more limited way. Effective border interventions raise the cost to the drug cartels of doing business, which translates to higher prices, which translates to less addiction and harm. However, past evidence clearly shows that border control alone is an insufficient answer.
Mexico undoubtedly faces immense challenges regarding corruption and violence associated with drug cartels. The announcement late last year by the Sinaloa cartel, one of the two largest, that they would severely enforce their own purported ban on making fentanyl was tragically laughable.
There are still many officials in Mexico willing to seriously address some of those challenges, especially in a focused context such as this—as there were fifteen years ago. We must assist with and encourage those efforts, particularly in their Attorney General’s Office and COFEPRIS, Mexico’s public health agency.
In January 2023, the United States-Mexico-Canada Trilateral Fentanyl Committee (TFC) was initiated to coordinate joint efforts between those three nations to reduce the supply of illicit synthetics such as fentanyl and meth, leading to some progress.
That is a good start, and with a fresh administration now in office in Mexico, new opportunities for effective collaboration will arise.
The China Challenge
China’s inaction has long fed America’s drug crisis. China’s denial of responsibility and pointing to U.S. demand as the main cause is akin to the British blaming Chinese demand for opium as an excuse for continuing to flood China with a highly addictive and destructive drug two centuries ago.
Fortunately, there has been recent progress. The Biden administration’s 2022 National Drug Control Strategy included provisions that highlighted the need to address international precursors from China feeding the synthetic drug epidemic in our country. Unfortunately, it was not made the top priority it needs to be. Instead, individual harm reduction became the top focus, and in the face of the failure to address the ongoing addiction and overdose death epidemic, the policy shifted.
President Biden and China’s President Xi Jinping held a widely publicized summit in San Francisco in November of last year, after which President Xi agreed to resume bilateral cooperation and law enforcement coordination that had previously stalled. The Counternarcotics Working Group (CNWG) emerged in January of 2024 and the Biden administration highlighted this “concrete action” in its 2024 National Drug Control Strategy.
Supply-Side Priorities for the Next Administration
Regardless of who wins the presidential election in November, the new U.S. administration in January must make supply reduction through effective control of fentanyl and meth precursors a focal point of U.S. drug policy. They should not revert to false or misleading narratives around the failed war on drugs or the ability of harm reduction to be the foundation for any real solution to this problem that is killing 100,000 Americans each year.
Like China, we must also learn the hard lessons of the Opium Wars and end the flooding of our country with powerful, pure, potent, and cheap synthetic drugs.
Rob Bovett is an adjunct professor at Lewis & Clark Law School, in Portland, Oregon, where he teaches drug law and policy. He is a member of the Stanford Network on Addiction Policy and served as a member and on the board of the National Methamphetamine and Pharmaceuticals Initiative during the Bush and Obama administrations.
If the past century of failed US drug policies have taught us anything, it should be this: You cannot address drug addiction as simply a supply side problem. You have to also respond to the demand side. In practice this means providing affordable/free medical care for willing addicts and providing them with gainful employment in safe environments. You also have to provide plenty of jobs - with the state or federal government if the private sector cannot not step up. These jobs need to provide a living wage to every adult willing to work. This will not be cheap and it will also require building additional housing in depressed areas.... Are we going to try to be good Samaritans or are we a nation that wants Trump as dictator of a police state?
Gee, if only there were some type of metaphor to organize America's battle against dangerous illegal drugs and describe the effort to combat their importation and abuse. What could you call something like that, I wonder?