The Fentanyl Menace

Dr. Munr Kazmir
4 min readAug 5, 2024

“At the tap of a buyer’s smartphone, Chinese chemical sellers will air-ship fentanyl ingredients door-to-door to North America,” found a Reuters investigative report in July. Can anything be done?

(Photo: Jeff Anderson)

We bought everything needed to make $3 million worth of fentanyl,” the explosive investigative report from Reuters began. The next sentence was devastating: “All it took was $3,600 and a web browser.

“At the tap of a buyer’s smartphone, Chinese chemical sellers will air-ship fentanyl ingredients door-to-door to North America,” found the investigative team consisting of Maurice Tamman, Laura Gottesdiener, and Stephen Eisenhammer on July 25, 2024. “Reuters purchased enough to make 3 million pills. Such deals are astonishingly easy — and reveal how drug traffickers are eluding efforts to halt the deadly trade behind the fentanyl crisis.”

The report’s authors discovered the same disquieting drug-trade underpinnings that investigative journalist Peter Schweitzer exposed in his recent bestseller, “Blood Money: Why the Powerful Turn a Blind Eye While China Kills Americans.

In recent years, the United States has found itself embroiled in a harrowing battle against a deadly new adversary in the War On Drugs: fentanyl. This synthetic opioid, up to 100 times more potent than morphine, is wreaking havoc from coast to coast, claiming thousands of…

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