Opioids produced by communist China and sold by illegal immigrants have killed hundreds of thousands of Americans. A new congressional research shows that the opioid problem is also having an economic impact.
Costs to society
The frequency of drug overdose deaths in the U.S. has grown five-fold since 1999. According to the CDC, opioid-related deaths rose 38% in 2019 and 56% in 2020.
CDC: 75% of the 107,622 drug overdose deaths in 2021 involved opioids. Fentanyl kills most 18-45-year-olds.
Rep. David Trone (D-Md.), a member of the Congressional Joint Economic Committee that produced the drug epidemic study, says: "It's like a 737 crashing daily with no survivors. The death toll is staggering."
The opioid crisis will cost the U.S. economy $1.47 trillion in 2020, according to the JEC. That's $487 billion more than 2019 and 37% more than 2017.
Given the surge in opioid overdose deaths last year, "the total cost is likely to climb," the research said.
The crisis cost $696 billion in 2018, or 3.4% of GDP, according to the CEA.
Previous cost estimates, like the CEA's, accounted for lost lives, increases in health care and substance addiction treatment expenses, criminal justice costs, and productivity losses.
Misbehaving
Craig Singleton, senior scholar at the nonpartisan Foundation for Defense of Democracies, told Fox News Digital: "Since 2013, China has been the main source of fentanyl entering America's illicit drug market."
In a January 2020 study, the DEA underlined China's role in exporting the fentanyl that has killed hundreds of thousands of Americans.
Mexico and China are the main sources of fentanyl and similar drugs trafficked into the U.S.
China also smuggles drugs through international mail and express cargo operations.
Under pressure from former President Trump, China banned fentanyl domestically in 2019. Only "approved enterprises with particular permits" can develop, sell, and export fentanyl-class pharmaceuticals, Singleton said.
In a September 15 document, the Republican Study Committee said Chinese operations persisted despite the ban, only closer to America, and "fentanyl trafficking across our border soared by 132%" in 2021.
After China's apparent crackdown on fentanyl, gangs in Mexico began producing fentanyl using Chinese precursor chemicals.
Rep. David Trone, who worked on the latest JEC study, said, "China's crucially implicated in the… deaths we had because they're the lone supplier of [fentanyl] precursor chemicals to Mexico."
"They know it's being delivered to Mexico by Chinese intermediaries who sell it directly to Mexican cartels," Trone said. "It's flowing into the U.S. by the hundreds of millions of tablets, and the chain starts in China."
Sinaloa and Jalisco New Generation cartels get much of their fentanyl from China.
Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis blamed China on September 22 for the fentanyl issue. "If you look at their manufacturing fentanyl and exporting it to drug cartels, it wouldn't be occurring without China," he said.
Under the Biden administration, "Mexican transnational criminal groups are working with Chinese gangs to smuggle fentanyl components. The Biden administration must pressure China to act."
The RSC wrote, "The Biden administration's weakness has allowed cartels and Chinese actors to develop."
In addition to making China and Mexico accountable and dealing with fatal narcotics and millions of illegal aliens, the RSC advocated other legislative solutions, including:
*Rep. Paul Gosar's bill requiring life in prison or the death sentence for distributing fentanyl that kills;
*Rep. Tim Burchett's bill requiring a life sentence for fentanyl traffickers; and
*The late Indiana Republican Rep. Jackie Warlorski's measure to sue other countries for death or damage caused by unlawful fentanyl trafficking into the U.S.
According to "The Hundred-Year Marathon," by Michael Pillsbury, director of the Center on Chinese Strategy at the Hudson Institute, elements of the communist Chinese regime have long aspired to "replace the United States as the economic, military, and political leader of the world by 2049" (the 100th anniversary of the Communist Revolution), in part to "avenge or 'wipe clean' (xi xue) past foreign humiliations," such as the Chinese addiction to imports.
A 2021 Pentagon report said China aims to "achieve 'the great rejuvenation of the Chinese nation' by 2049 to match or surpass U.S. global influence and power, displace U.S. alliances and security partnerships in the Indo-Pacific region, and revise the international order to benefit Beijing's authoritarian system."
Apparently, communists will make "vast efforts" to achieve this geopolitical goal.
The preceding is a summary of an article that originally appeared on BLAZE MEDIA.
