> “Scapegoating others, especially China that has been trying to help, cannot resolve the U.S. problem of fentanyl,” Liu said. “What the U.S. needs to do is to reduce domestic demand, strengthen prescription control, (and) step up (its) drug awareness campaign.”

The Chinese do have a point with the first part, but the second part is wrong. The opioid crisis of the US is homemade, just as the meth crisis in Europe is - and it's not pill mills or a lack of drug awareness that's causing it. Everyone is aware of the dangers of drugs, and pain patients have serious issues across Western countries to actually get treatment these days that's harder than cannabis because doctors go with "you're just an user" to play safe.

The drug crises of the West are crises of economic perspective and crises of the (mental) health systems. It's no surprise that drug abuse correlates with "left-behind" areas on one side, and on the other side with homeless and/or mentally ill people in urban areas that self-medicate the immense stress they're going through.

Living on the streets with a job is hard enough, living on the streets unemployed is even harder, and living on the streets with unmet mental or physical health needs... it doesn't get worse than that.

Side note: the reason why it's fentanyl and meth that's causing most of the trouble is simple - both are incredibly easy to synthesize (to the point entire TV shows got made about it), and fentanyl is just so potent that it doesn't make sense to harvest poppy in Afghanistan and smuggle it across the world any more.

How difficult is the reaction? I went to a high school with a chemistry specialization, and the most clear thing about organic reactions is that they are hard. You get only a 20% or 30% of the product and you have to purify it becase a big part of the other 80% made similar products that you don't like. I don't know the details of fentanyl but they have a few reactives so it look like they must perform multiple steps, so I guess a global 1% efficiency.

It’s like the modern Opium war

Im just on the phone to the local police station.

I'm not a grass!