Chemical weapon just a click away
DRUG WAR: China faces pressure to control distribution of deadly narcotic carfentanil
SHANGHAI — It’s one of the strongest opioids in circulation, so deadly an amount smaller than a poppyseed can kill a person. Until July, when reports of carfentanil overdoses began to surface in the United States, the substance was best known for knocking out elephants — or as a chemical weapon.
Despite the dangers, Chinese vendors offer to sell carfentanil openly online, for worldwide export, no questions asked, an Associated Press investigation has found. The AP identified 12 Chinese businesses that said they would export carfentanil to the United States, Canada, the United Kingdom, France, Germany, Belgium and Australia for as little as $2,750 a kilogram.
Carfentanil burst into view this summer as the latest scourge in an epidemic of opioid abuse that has killed tens of thousands in the U.S. alone.
In Canada, authorities on Friday confirmed the first two carfentanil overdoses. The victims were two men in their 30s, one in Calgary, the other in the Edmonton area. They overdosed last summer, but the presence of the deadly drug was only confirmed last week.
RCMP Supt. Yvon de Champlain said Canadian authorities seized 1 kg of carfentanil that had arrived from China in August.
“That had the potential to produce 50 million doses,” he said.
A dose the size of a grain of sand can be lethal, said Dr. Karen Grimsrud, Alberta’s chief medical officer of health.
In China, carfentanil is not a controlled substance. The U.S. government is pressing China to blacklist it, but Beijing has yet to act.
“We can supply carfentanil ... for sure,” a saleswoman from Jilin Tely Import and Export Co. wrote in broken English in a September email. “And it’s one of our hot sales products.”
The AP did not actually order any drugs, or test whether the products on offer were genuine.
China’s Ministry of Public Security declined multiple requests for comment.
For decades before being discovered by drug dealers, carfentanil and substances like it were researched as chemical weapons by the U.S., U.K., Russia, Israel, China, the Czech Republic and India, according to publicly available documents. They are banned from the battlefield under the Chemical Weapons Convention.
“It’s a weapon,” said Andrew Weber, U.S. assistant secretary of defence for nuclear, chemical and biological defence programs from 2009 to 2014. “Companies shouldn’t be just sending it to anybody.”
Carfentanil is 100 times more powerful than fentanyl, a related drug that is itself up to 50 times stronger than heroin.
Forms of fentanyl are suspected in an unsuccessful 1997 attempt by Mossad agents to kill a Hamas leader in Jordan, and were used to lethal effect by Russian forces against Chechen separatists who took hundreds of hostages at a Moscow theatre in 2002.
The theatre siege prompted the U.S. to develop strategies to counter carfentanil’s potential use as a tool of war or terrorism, said Weber. “Countries that we are concerned about were interested in using it for offensive purposes,” he said. “We are also concerned that groups like ISIS could order it commercially.”
More recently, dealers discovered that vast profits could be made by cutting fentanyls into illicit drugs. In fiscal year 2014, U.S. authorities seized just 3.7 kilograms of fentanyl. This fiscal year, through just mid-July, they seized 134.1 kilograms, Customs and Border Protection data show. Overdose rates have been skyrocketing.
In B.C., the chief coroner said there had been 488 drug overdose deaths between January and August, most of them involving fentanyl. By comparison, the number of overdose deaths for all of 2015 was 505.
In Alberta, fentanyl has killed 153 people in the first half of 2016, compared with 139 over the same time period last year.
The DEA has pushed China to control carfentanil, said Russell Baer, a DEA special agent in Washington.
“I know China is looking at it very closely,” he said. Delegations of top Chinese and U.S. drug enforcement officials met in August and September to discuss opioids, but failed to produce a substantive announcement on carfentanil.
Last October, China added 116 synthetic drugs to its controlled substances list. Acetylfentanyl, a weak fentanyl variant, was among them. Six months later, monthly seizures of acetylfentanyl in the U.S. were down 60 per cent, DEA data obtained by the AP shows.