Drazen Jorgic, Laura Gottesdiener, Kristina Cooke, and Stephen Eisenhammer of Reuters tell their readers how fentanyl traffickers are exploiting U.S. trade law to kill Americans. They write:
Hundreds of millions of small packages pour into the U.S. each year from China – some with fentanyl ingredients stashed inside. Now, a fight is shaping up over whether and how to undo the rule change that helped set off this deadly import boom.
In January 2023, U.S. federal agents raided the home of a Tucson maintenance worker who had a side hustle hauling packages across the border to Mexico.
They estimate that over the previous two years, the gray-bearded courier had ferried about 7,000 kilos of fentanyl-making chemicals to an operative of the Sinaloa Cartel. That’s 15,432 pounds, sufficient to produce 5.3 billion pills – enough to kill every living soul in the United States several times over. The chemicals had traveled by air from China to Los Angeles, were flown or ground-shipped to Tucson, then driven the last miles to Mexico by the freelance delivery driver.
Even more astonishing is what fed this circuitous route: a few paragraphs buried in a 2016 U.S. trade law supported by major parcel carriers and e-commerce platforms that made it easier for imported goods, including those fentanyl ingredients, to enter the United States. […]
U.S. lawmakers inadvertently turbocharged this problem as part of the 2016 legislation by loosening a regulation known as de minimis. Individual parcels of clothing, gadgets and other merchandise valued at up to $800 – one of the highest such limits in the world – now enter the country duty-free and with minimal paperwork and inspections. Fully 90% of all shipments now enter the country this way, and most arrive by air, according to U.S. Customs and Border Protection. The liberalized trade rule has been a boon for retailers and e-commerce platforms such as China-founded Temu and Shein that ship merchandise directly to buyers’ doorsteps. […]
The packages keep coming. The United States received nearly 1.4 billion de minimis shipments in fiscal 2024, up 40% from the previous year, U.S. Customs data show.
Overdose deaths from the fentanyl crisis, which began about a decade ago, also keep climbing. By the end of this year, the synthetic opioid epidemic is expected to have claimed nearly half a million American lives, according to the latest government forecast.
That death toll already exceeds the number of U.S. soldiers killed in the Second World War.
Read more here.
