US-China fentanyl cooperation gathers momentum with senior meeting in Washington
China and the US have agreed to further strengthen dialogue and promote "in-depth" drug control, in the first senior-level meeting of the working group formed after the mechanism was agreed at the leaders' summit in November.
The cross-sectoral delegations met in Washington, where they "exchanged their respective concerns, exchanged views and suggestions, and clarified the direction of cooperation, according to China's state news agency Xinhua.
A White House readout on Thursday said discussions had focused on ways to strengthen coordination on law enforcement actions, disrupt the illicit financing of transnational criminal organisation networks, and accelerate the scheduling of synthetic drugs and precursor chemicals.
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The meeting also covered measures to address the illicit diversion of precursor chemicals, exchange information on emerging threats and advance progress in multilateral forums, it said.
Jennifer Daskal, deputy assistant to the president and deputy homeland security adviser, led the US delegation, while the head of the Chinese side was Wei Xiaojun, director general of the Ministry of Public Security's Narcotics Control Bureau.
The US-China Counternarcotics Working Group mechanism was launched in January, following the 2023 summit in San Francisco between Chinese President Xi Jinping and his US counterpart Joe Biden.
The leaders agreed to resume bilateral anti-narcotics cooperation - stalled since former House speaker Nancy Pelosi's visit to Taiwan in August 2022 - to combat global manufacturing and trafficking of synthetic drugs, including fentanyl.
Since then, Chinese police have shut down 14 websites, suspended 332 business accounts and 1,016 online shops and operations, and "significantly reduced the number of online advertisements related to fentanyl", the public security ministry said in June.
The agency added 46 new psychoactive substances to its controlled-substances list and issued a notice warning companies against trading precursor chemicals that might be used for producing fentanyl, it said.
Also in June, Chinese law enforcement arrested a suspected money launderer alleged to be working for a Mexican drug cartel, following a tip-off from US intelligence services.
China imposed class-wide controls over all fentanyl-related substances in 2019. Chinese courts sentenced a number of defendants for trafficking fentanyl to the US and Canada, as a result of joint US-China investigations in 2019 and 2021.
The opioid has led to the deaths of more than 100,000 Americans a year for the past few years, as the US fentanyl crisis continues to worsen, according to the US Centres for Disease Control and Prevention.
This article originally appeared in the South China Morning Post (SCMP), the most authoritative voice reporting on China and Asia for more than a century. For more SCMP stories, please explore the SCMP app or visit the SCMP's Facebook and Twitter pages. Copyright © 2024 South China Morning Post Publishers Ltd. All rights reserved.
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