Much has already been written about the transformation of downtown San Francisco. Until a few years ago, the Union Square area was home to many department stores that were particularly popular with tourists, but everything has changed since the Covid-19 pandemic. One after the other, local businesses lowered the curtain, giving way to hordes of Americans addicted to fentanyl, the synthetic drug at the origin of the biggest health scandal America has faced in decades. Now, the famous square is haunted by many drugged people, completely disoriented, wandering around the neighborhood like zombies… And overdoses are increasing.
The case of Union Square has become symptomatic of an America that is failing to counter this scourge. Since 2010, the substance has caused the deaths of more than 400,000 people nationwide – the equivalent of the population of a city like Minneapolis – including more than 70,000 in 2023 alone. the number of deaths is down slightly, in particular thanks to a decision by the Biden administration to facilitate access to naloxone, an antidote used to stop an opioid overdose. But the circulation of fentanyl is still out of control.
Barely elected and not yet invested, Donald Trump has already made several announcements on the subject. In two messages broadcast on his Truth Social network, he promised the establishment of new customs tariffs against China, Mexico and Canada “which will remain in place until drugs, starting by fentanyl […] stop invading the United States.” As usual, the new American president has adopted a particularly vindictive tone and even if his partners deny it, they play an important role (sometimes despite themselves) in the health crisis which is currently shaking his country.
To understand the causes of the epidemic, we must go back to the early 1990s. At that time, American doctors, influenced by powerful pharmaceutical laboratories, began to massively prescribe painkillers previously reserved for extreme medical cases. Thousands of Americans with minor – but painful – injuries are prescribed opiates such as oxycodone, a highly addictive product. At the end of treatment, many patients then seek to obtain pills on the black market and the number of overdoses increases sharply, alerting the public authorities. We are at the turn of the 2010s and American regulatory authorities are making the prescription of these drugs more complicated. Addicted people then turn to harsher opioids, starting with fentanyl.
Until 2019, this was massively imported from China, in the form of whole pills, but negotiations between Chinese President Xi Jinping and the first Trump administration made it possible to reduce these imports. A new black market has begun to take shape, based on a complex commercial chain – and it is this that Donald Trump hopes to dismantle today.
A new triangular trade
In a declassified note of 2020, the Drug Enforcement Association, a federal agency reporting to the US Department of Justice, briefly describes how fentanyl continues to circulate in the United States. Chinese traders produce “precursors” of the molecule, that is to say raw components which, combined with others, allow the chemical reaction necessary for the formation of fentanyl. They are then exported to North America and particularly to Mexico. There, clandestine laboratories often belonging to cartels transform these components into fentanyl pills, then resell them illegally on the American market.
What the memo does not specify is how the United States itself facilitates these transactions today. Even more: they often play a key intermediary role in these exchanges. At the end of his last term, Barack Obama raised the ceiling de minimisi.e. the threshold from which customs duties apply, from 200 to 800 dollars. In other words, all goods costing less than $800 (imported by individuals) were exempt from customs tariffs. This measure was widely supported by small merchants, but also by many Americans who are fans of online shopping, who greatly benefited from it. The American Department of Foreign Trade underlines that over the last ten years, “the number of packages entering the United States [sous ce régime] increased significantly from around 140 million to more than a billion per year.” The flow is so enormous; American customs can only controla tiny part of these packages. Obviously, the explosion in the number of exempt packages has largely benefited Chinese platforms like Temu or Shein, but also sellers of fentanyl precursor compounds.
Rather than sending their products directly to Mexico (where the threshold de minimis is 50 dollars), they first export their production to the United States. From there, the large transporters take the components across the border where the cartels recover the goods, transform them into fentanyl pills, before selling them to Uncle Sam’s country. For China, the remonstrances of future president are unacceptable. “The opioid epidemic is a problem that America inflicts on itself,” denounced Liu Pengyu, spokesperson for the Chinese embassy in Washington, “the United States must stop blaming China for the crisis that is theirs.”
Last September, the Biden administration proposed a plan to “stem abuses linked to exemptions de minimis.” A recent report from the congressional committee responsible for regulating relations between China and the United States even recommends completely removing this provision. The final decision will rest with the next administration which takes office in early January 2025.