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Comment by vkou | Hacker News Reader

I like how you manage to assign blame for the actions of a few drug dealers to an entire country.

There's basically one company making all this fentanyl. We know where it is, we know where the CEO lives. He's walking around free and in the open in China.

You are wrong to blame an entire country for our addiction to fentanyl. The facts are:

1. Fentanyl has legitimate pharmaceutical uses.

2. There are many, many, many legal manufacturers of Fentanyl, across the world, including Bayer, Johnson&Johnson, Meiji Seika Pharma (Japan), and yes, Chinese manufacturers. Some legal fentanyl ends up getting diverted into illegal channels.

3. There are also many, many, many illegal manufacturers of Fentanyl, again, across the world.

4. The reason for why China has had an outsized share of illegal fentanyl production is that for many years, it (and its derivatives and precursors) has not been a controlled substance.

5. Fentanyl is now a controlled substance in China, and it, its precursors, and its derivatives have been controlled substances since May 2019.

And yet in August we seized a Chinese shipment of fentanyl large enough to kill an entire state's worth of people. When China actually does something beyond lip service, then I'll believe you. Let's not forget, every major industry in China is controlled by the party. Whether it was a controlled substance in China is irrelevant to whether or not they're literally killing us by the tens of thousands a year.

https://www.foxnews.com/media/opioid-crisis-fentanyl-china-m...

Maybe what's killing America is that its sense of personal responsibility has degraded so much that it's now acceptable to blame its drug problems on the Chinese government. Not the individual's fault, not the parents' fault, not the American government's fault, not the society's fault, but the Chinese government's fault.

What seized were not fentanyl, but some chemicals could be used in the fentanyl manufacturing process, as well as many other legitimate use.

If you want to stop fentanyl, the best thing to do is to figure out what chemicals are used exclusively in fentayl production and build an international coalition to ban those. Unfortunately many people just don't appreciate this kind of sophistication and prefer an easier blame game.

I have to admit, I wasn't expecting the Chinese people are stupid defense. I guess they have no idea who their customers are or what their products are being used for.

In low end manufacturing sector it's really hard to know your end customers. The products are highly standardized and can go though multiple middlemen. Also the sheer volume, most of which are legitimate, makes it very difficult for governments to track.

It seems hard to believe that the rise of fentanyl could be traced to only one company/individual - could you be more specific about the person/people you're referring to?

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2018-05-22/deadly-ch...

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