US asks China for help stopping mail-order opioids

MEXICO CITY: The United States has asked China to crack down on postal shipments of synthetic opioids, which President Donald Trump says are fueling a US drugabuse crisis, a State Department official said Wednesday.

Because synthetic opioids, such as the highly potent drug fentanyl, are hard to detect in the mail, fighting drug trafficking into the United States has become “a completely different ballgame,” said James Walsh of the State Department’s Bureau of International Narcotics and Law Enforcement Affairs.

Walsh met this week with Chinese counter-narcotics officials in Cancun, Mexico, on the sidelines of a global conference on drug addiction.

It was a follow- up to conversations between Chinese President Xi Jinping and Trump, who declared the US opioid crisis a national public health emergency in October and said the United States needed to stop ‘the flood of cheap and deadly fentanyl’ coming from China.

Trump and Xi discussed the opioid crisis when they met in Beijing last month.

Ahead of that visit, Chinese officials disputed Trump’s claim that most US- bound fentanyl comes from China.

But Walsh said his Chinese counterparts were receptive to working to curb shipments of opioids produced in Chinese labs.

“We’ve been asking China to get better control on their production, better assistance with monitoring their mail that’s being shipped either to Mexico or the United States,” he told AFP.

“We’ve had very conversations.” — AFP good