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Comment by ChancyChance | Hacker News Reader

Yeah the rest of the article said that it is cheaper to make than most opioids so I guess it is just the walmartification of illegal drugs: fast and cheap and shoddy.

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Illicit fentanyl is mass produced in foreign pharmacy (90% in China), and pretty easy to smuggle in (used to be direct, now via Mexico), making it really cheap. There is also licit fentanyl to consider, which can become illicit due to prescription fraud or theft, but usually its cheap enough to just get illicitly imported fent.

China cracked down on fentanyl manufacture in 2019. “90% in China” is now more like 3%.

Nope. The only thing that has changed since 2019 is that people in China are no longer mailing it directly to the USA anymore (China cracked down on that because America threatened to end preferential mailing rates from China to the USA). Beijing is no longer cooperating with US authorities on stopping fentanyl flow from China:

https://www.wsj.com/articles/fentanyl-crisis-fed-by-flow-of-...

The chemicals are still making it to Mexico from China, that is still easy to track:

https://www.cnn.com/videos/world/2023/03/08/fentanyl-pipelin...

https://www.texasstandard.org/stories/fentanly-drug-path-chi...

Etc...

TLDR; China is still the source for the vast majority of fentanyl in the states (a lot of it is seized in Mexico in containers that come from china, though they get around this by just shipping a lot of it), and no one (including China) is really claiming otherwise since it is just too obvious ATM.

Easier logistics too because of the higher potency. If something is 10x more potent gram for gram, you can take the same revenue while spending 10x less on transportation while simultaneously reducing the chances of getting caught because the volume is so much smaller. Or conversely, for the same risk and transportation costs, make way more money per gram shipped.

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