Say you walk into a room with five other people:
A Canadian real estate mogul
A Sinaloan ranch hand
A Hong Kong business tycoon with ties to the Chinese Communist Party
A Vancouver port worker
A street guy named “Skunk Boy”
Which one would you guess is the drug dealer? Sadly, the answer might be “all of the above.”
China has weaponized fentanyl against the United States. It’s fighting a long battle, motivated by a desire to destabilize the US and challenge its economic and military hegemony, and by an ancient grudge, nearly biblical in scope, against the West over the 19th-century opium wars.
You might think of Mexican kingpins as the top of the drug food chain, but everybody works for somebody. And that somebody is often a gangster in China, made “respectable” by his other legitimate, public-facing business operations and a vital position within the Chinese Communist Party.
But it gets worse…
Today we’re speaking with Canadian investigative journalist Sam Cooper, whose deeply researched book Wilful Blindness exposes Canada’s damning role in the opioid trade.
This might explain why the Trump administration is going on the offensive with our northern neighbor.
Sam’s research uncovers an intricate network, where the inputs to make synthetic opioids like fentanyl move from China to Vancouver, where they are processed and released as a plague over all of North America. Meanwhile, the drug money is laundered through casinos, real estate, and Chinese exports.
The CCP has the capacity to cut off much of this highly sophisticated, highly profitable business, but to date, it has not. Sam’s work indicates it is in on the deal.
It’s a sensational story with Scorsese-like elements, but this is not a movie. I never want to lose sight of the human cost. Opioid deaths have soared in the past two decades. Many people who’ve overdosed began their drug descent on legal prescription opioids, and many others simply took a pill at a party, unaware it was laced with fentanyl.
Source: NIH
The opioid epidemic is no longer limited to the poorest corners of the rural United States or the grittiest neighborhoods of major US cities. The damage is everywhere, and it is growing. Yet powerful people are turning a blind eye to this “opium war in reverse.”
This is one of our most important Global Macro Update interviews to date. You can click the image above to watch it now. A full transcript of my conversation with Sam Cooper is available here.
I encourage you to follow this story and Sam Cooper at The Bureau.
Thanks for reading and watching.
