China’s Stealth Assassins

Let me ask you, what do you think China would do if President Xi discovered thousands of stealth drones, quiet assassins, entering China, each able to kill multiple Chinese of military age, then discovered they were killing 100,000 Chinese kids annually? Shrug? China does that to us – with fentanyl. Shrug?

Fentanyl is China’s assassin in your community, the one you never see. It sneaks up, addicts the user, quickly kills, and checks off another life. Annually, in 2023, it killed 100,000 Americans, with total overdose deaths topping 112,000, real numbers north of that, due to unreported drugged driving, and other drug tiebacks. 

That number of China-related deaths is five times all overdoses 20 years ago, suggesting – if uncontained – China-driven overdoses could go exponential shortly. even before fentanyl is found in public water.

More sobering, fentanyl is 50 to 100 times more potent than morphine, and DEA last year intercepted 360 million deadly doses, 90 percent from China. That is a fatal dose for all Americans, some left over.

Put differently, America’s total population ages 15 to 44 is just 65.54 million. That bracket fought and won WWII, and must fight and win all our wars. It is also the most productive, expected healthiest. 

Yet, 60 percent of all opioid overdoses are in that group, and stunningly fentanyl is now – with other synthetic opioids – the leading cause of death for Americans 18 to 45, in their prime. 

When my life’s work centered on counternarcotics – 1990s and early 2000s – these numbers would have sounded like science fiction, no chance America would see this devastation from synthetic overdoses, every state hit by stealth assassins, families crushed, communities in fear, lives snuffed in rising numbers.

Nor would we ever have imagined a China-origin drug outpacing cocaine, heroin, and meth, rooted in Colombia, Bolivia, Peru, and Mexico, with some meth from the Far East (now riding the fentanyl wave).

So, here we are, facing a “major national security threat” from Chinese fentanyl – what DHS admits is expected to be he “top national security threat killing Americans” in 2024 – and what is being done?

Little. Rather than alarm bells, rather than double funding and focus for DEA – empowering DEA to go after all drugs with strong presidential support, DEA lumbers along half-forgotten, deprioritized by this White House. Notably, Ronald Reagan met with the DEA and his AG on the drug issue quarterly, and drugs fell.

In fact, DEA – already weighed down by Homeland Security waving in illegal immigrant caravans (seven million illegals in three years, two million “getaways’) – has faced scrutiny at the top for insider contracts, and the number two resigned this year for being too cozy with Big Pharma. What next?

As in all big organizations, leadership matters. While it does at DEA, DHS, ICE, CBP, State, Defense, and elsewhere in this administration, the real signals come from the top, from the White House.

This White House has, for all intents, been AWOL on the drug overdose front, bowing to political pressures on the left to down-fund law enforcement, release convicted traffickers, deprioritize the border, encourage legalization of THC, minimize overdose deaths – and the national plague of addiction.

Rather than take responsibility for this exploding health, moral welfare, family degradation, overdose, and security crisis, the Biden Administration dishes useless words.  As with Afghanistan, they- falsely claim victory, saying they have “flattened the curve.” A third of a million dead kids in three years, and that is victory? Really?

Bottomline: China, Mexico, and others who want to do this nation damage, who do not care about your family, have had their way with Biden. The results are in. If this moment does not cry for a response to China’s stealth assassins, the fentanyl traffickers, none will. Needed: Authentic, effective leadership. 

Robert Charles is a former Assistant Secretary of State under Colin Powell, former Reagan and Bush 41 White House staffer, attorney, and naval intelligence officer (USNR). He wrote “Narcotics and Terrorism” (2003), “Eagles and Evergreens” (2018), and is National Spokesman for AMAC.