School of War - Ep 70: Will Scharf on China’s Fentanyl War on America

Episode Date: April 25, 2023

Will Scharf, former federal prosecutor and candidate for Missouri Attorney General, joins the show to talk about how the Chinese Communist Party uses fentanyl as part of a broader strategy to pressure the United States. ▪️ Times  • 01:16 Introduction  • 02:19 Law enforcement and policy • 04:39 What is fentanyl?  • 06:53 Violent Crimes • 09:00 Fentanyl’s strength • 12:02 Fentanyl vs opium • 13:24 Origins • 17:52 China’s role • 21:09 The Opium Wars  • 25:41 The Chinese enigma  • 34:13 What can we do?  • 38:02 The cartels • 41:03 Cui bono?

In the West, we have a habit of thinking about war as a kind of interruption to peace. That war is, as one famous theorist put it, a continuation of policy by other means. But for the Chinese Communist Party, something like the opposite is true. Until such time as the revolution is complete, what may appear to the naive eye as peace is simply one more phase of the struggle. In other words, policy is the continuation of war. What does the war that the CCP wages on us today look like? Let's talk about fentanyl.

It is a prescription for war, this Iraqi invasion of Hawaii. December 7, 1941, a date which will live in infamous. The bloody experience of Vietnam is to end in a stay on it. We continue to face a grave situation in Iran. The people who are not seen buildings. We shall fight on the beaches. We shall fight on the landing grounds. We shall fight in the fields and in the streets.

We shall never surrender. Hi, I'm Aaron McLean. Thanks for joining School of War. I am delighted to be joined today by Will Scharf. Will is a former federal prosecutor. He is currently a candidate for the Office of Attorney General in the great state of Missouri. Will, thanks so much for joining the show. Thanks so much for having me, Aaron. Longtime fan of the podcast, and it's truly an honor to be with you here. Thanks. An honor to have you. So what we are going to talk about today is a little unconventional in terms of what we've done so far on the show. But I think it will make sense here as we get into it. The idea is to talk about. about U.S.-China competition, which is not unconventional. We talk about that a lot on School of War, but to zoom in on the question of fentanyl, which as a prosecutor and a law enforcement official, you were in the trenches in St. Louis, if I'm not mistaken, fighting the war against fentanyl on America's streets.

But there's a broader, there's a bigger picture here that we're going to get into about the way in which fentanyl, in effect, is a tool of Chinese policy. So that's where we're going. But before we get there, can I just ask, you know, tell us a bit about yourself. You are, I believe, you're not our first lawyer, but I believe you are our first prosecutor on the show. So tell us about yourself how you got to become a law enforcement professional. Sure.

So as you said, I'm currently running for Missouri Attorney General, but until last November, I was a federal prosecutor attached to the violent crimes unit and the U.S. Attorney's Office for the Eastern District of Missouri, which covers the greater St. Louis area. as well as half of the state of Missouri. It was an interesting career change for me. I had previously worked primarily in politics and public policy, but it had always been a dream of mine, really going back to law school to be a federal prosecutor and to get to represent the United States in court. So I pivoted to a pretty different sort of profession, actually at the height of COVID, starting in June of 2020. One of the interesting things, for me, particularly as it relates to our subject and the fentanyl epidemic, is I had previously served as policy director to the governor of Missouri from 2017 to 2018. And at that time,

we were dealing with the opioid epidemic in almost a prior incarnation. At that point, we were looking primarily at prescription drug overdoses and then heroin overdoses in the form of both black tar and white powder heroin. On arriving in the U.S. Attorney's Office, as I started getting case after case after case involving fentanyl and none involving or essentially none involving heroin, certainly if there was heroin involved, it was almost always adultered with fentanyl.

I realized that something very radical had happened between 2017 and 2020, and that's what kind of led me down the rabbit hole of researching fentanyl, trying to understand where it comes from, what it does, and why it's led to the crisis we face in America today, where, as I'm sure most of your listeners know, over 100,000 people overdosed on drugs last year in America, a vast majority of which are driven by fentanyl and fentanyl analogs. So I think probably a lot of listeners are aware of sort of in general terms of severity the situation. Unfortunately, some of them may even have been touched by this, considering how widespread

the effects are. But it might be, let's start basic. Like, what is fentanyl? Like, what has come out of the blue in the last few years? And then the obvious follow-on question is why? So, fentanyl is a synthetic opioid. Opioids are a class of drugs that bind with a particular set of neuroreceptors, the most famous of which are derived from the opium poppy, which I'm sure is an Afghanistan veteran. you know more about than most. More recently, starting in the 20th century and really picking up steam after World War II, a number of opioids have been synthetically manufactured. That's not deriving from a plant.

Fentanyl itself was first manufactured or first discovered by a man named Paul Jansen in 1959. It received its first FDA label in 1968. Jansen ended up becoming Janssen. pharmaceuticals, which is now a division of Johnson and Johnson. We talk more about China, I'm assuming later in the podcast, there's more to be said there. But fentanyl is a relatively common drug in clinical settings, or at least it has been historically, whether used as an anesthetic during surgeries, transdermal fentanyl patches have been a painkiller for decades in America. This is a prescribed drug, but it's a very, very powerful drug. If you compare it to traditional morphine, which has been

used as a painkiller, obviously, for one form or another for centuries, fentanyl's about a hundred times stronger than morphine. And compared to street heroin, depending on the heroin you're talking about, and purity and quality and kind, it can be almost a 50 to one strength ratio there as well. So fentanyl is extraordinarily powerful, which makes it desirable for a number of reasons for both dealers and to an extent addicts as well. But that's the basic history of it. And so talk, let's personalize this a little bit, you know, in your work as a prosecutor going after, I assume you can see you're a federal prosecutor, probably going after networks and sort of larger scale criminals. How did you see this new drug? How did you see its effects actually

playing out in the cases you were working on. Give us some examples of what you were seeing and how fentanyl sort of, it seems, aggravates things. Well, and so, you know, I was primarily a violent crime prosecutor, so I wasn't doing the kind of long drug investigations into the cartels that you'd sort of see on TV. What we were dealing with was gang interdiction on a neighborhood by neighborhood level. But fentanyl was just everywhere you'd look. I remember in one particular case, we executed a search warrant on a house and found over a kilo of fentanyl and a fentanyl and a fentanyl analog called paraflur fentanyl, which was popular at the time in the St. Louis area, probably almost an order of magnitude stronger even than fentanyl. And the stuff was just

lying around the house. There were pill presses, there were mixing bowls, there were coffee grinders, which are often used to mix or adulterate drugs together. But this was just, there was nothing special about this operation, except for the quantity of incredibly dangerous drugs that were just lying around. And I remember talking to the case agents I was working with at the time just about how common this must be in the area that we're seeing based on the amount of drugs that were on the street, and how scary that is, that just in a random garden apartment, there were thousands and thousands and thousands, if not millions of lethal doses of one of the most dangerous drugs in the world just sitting out on counters.

Yeah, the potency of this stuff is really crazy, right? Like, it's this terrible case with these, I think it was West Point cadets, right? Out on spring break last year, if I'm not mistaken. And you had, these numbers are not going to be entirely accurate because I'm doing this on the fly, but something like a half dozen overdoses, there were some fatalities in there. But the fact that stuck with me was that two of the overdoses were for, for, you know, cadets who had not actually used the drug, but were apparently providing mouth-to-mouth resuscitation for those who are already suffering the overdoses. And that is like an astonishing

fact that speaks to like the lethality of what we're discussing, right? So the typical number that you'll see in the literature is that a lethal dose of pure fentanyl is 0.02 grams, which I think is it's about three grains of sand. Now, most of the fentanyl you see on the street has been stepped on and adulterated and mixed. So it's very rare to find the pure product just out on the street like that. If you're mixing heroin, let's say you're a drug dealer and you're cutting heroin with dormant or just other adultering agents, which is common. I mean, essentially all drug dealers do that. And you get your ratios off by a little bit. Chances are the end user, maybe he gets a slightly stronger or slightly weaker product than he's used to.

But there's not a huge difference. With fentanyl, since you're stepping on it so much, since there's so much less active drug being mixed with so much more cutting agent, even a very small mistake, particularly when you account for the fact that these are not high-tech mixing operations. Once the drug gets here, it's typically being mixed and chopped up in operations like I described before, just a mixing bowl in a random apartment. the chances to accidentally create fatal doses, it just skyrockets.

And it's especially true with some fentanyl analogs that are even more powerful than fentanyl. Fentanyl analogs is a, it's a generic term for drugs that are similar in chemical composition to fentanyl, but are also opioids. Some of those can be even more powerful than fentanyl. And as you start cutting together all these different substances, the end product just gets more and more dangerous. And that's a key driver of opioid overdoses. The other thing that we're seeing increasingly is fentanyl being used as an adultering agent

with other drugs, including cocaine, ecstasy, even drugs that you just wouldn't expect fentanyl to be anywhere near, as opposed to opioids, which at least it's similar and of the same kind of drug to. But we've seen all over the country a rash of, of people thinking they're using cocaine, but actually getting a product that's been spiked with fentanyl and overdosing for that reason, people who have never used an opioid before in their lives who don't have a developed resistance to it, getting their first hit and dropping dead. And that's been a key driver of the overdose epidemic as well.

Yeah, no, it's terrifying stuff. It's not like the old-fashioned wet opium that I was familiar with with my time in Afghanistan, where everyone had a kilo in their house as their nestick, which ironically occasionally would get them arrested because not to bore everyone with the details, but it was virtually impossible to arrest somebody for quote-unquote terrorism offenses because of the intricacies of the so-called Afghan judicial system at the time. But it was very easy to arrest people for, you know, essentially large-scale opium possession. But everyone, I mean, just everyone in central Helmand province had substantial quantities of opium. So people would always look at you with a confused look on their

face when you explained why they were being arrested. It's worth thinking about the complexity of that supply chain versus what we're talking about with fentanyl, though, that to develop heroin traditionally, you needed to have poppies being grown in a particular geography like Afghanistan, Turkey, some parts of Mexico. That then needed to be processed and distilled into heroin of various qualities and various types and then trans-shipped into a destination country like the United States. Now with fentanyl, you can order precursors from China or India, at times even on the internet and cook the stuff up in relatively simple labs. The chemical interactions are not all that complicated,

and the instructions have been online freely available for years now. So the supply chain has, in some respect, shortened or at least dramatically simplified from the sort of drug manufacturing and distribution that you're talking about with, you know, wet opium slash morphine being being trucked around in Afghanistan. Right. Well, look, so this is where I think we get to this being a proper school of war episode with a longstanding school of war theme. So where does fentanyl, or at least much of the fentanyl in the United States, come from? So 90% of fentanyl in America is derived in one way or another from China. Either it is fentanyl that has been produced in China, typically legally and then diverted for illegal purposes, or the fentanyl in America was cooked in a

third country, typically Mexico, based on fentanyl precursor chemicals that have been shipped from China. That 90% number is obviously an estimate, but it seems to be a pretty good estimate based on seizures and based on what we know about the international trade in fentanyl. There was a key inflection point during the Trump administration in 2019. Prior to 2019, fentanyl was lawful in China. It was not a scheduled drug in China. So you saw just massive amounts of fentanyl being shipped directly, often on the dark web or just in other ways, directly to America. And we had big seizures at ports and everything you'd expect that would come along with that trade. Since 2019, the action has shifted increasingly towards precursor chemicals being cooked in China,

a ship to Mexico where the cartels then do the final stages of preparation of the actual fentanyl and then traffic it across the border. The size and scope of the industry is massive. Last year at the border, customs and border protection seized approximately, 15,000 pounds of fentanyl, and the DEA separately seized approximately 10,000 pounds of powder fentanyl, plus millions of pills containing fentanyl. So we're talking about truly industrial scale operations at every stage of the supply chain, ending with distribution in American cities and the human cost that we've seen. I mean, I'm not that good at mental math,

But if it takes, however many, what was it 0.0. What was the ounce level to get to a fatal dose? 0.02 grams. 0.02 grams. Anyone out there who is good at mental math, noodle on that, 0.02 grams to get a fatal dose and then, depending on how you add up the numbers, you just said something. He's like 15 or 25,000 pounds, just seized. That's just seized. So that's not what's actually making it successfully across. How many fatal dose is coming into the United States every year? That's an insane calculation. Each year the U.S. government is seizing something on the order of hundreds of millions of fatal dose equivalence of fentanyl. And we assume that a vast majority of the fentanyl that's being trucked into America is not being seized. So the scope of this is huge and it seems to keep getting worse. Each year, we see year-on-year increases both in overdose deaths and in seizures. One of the interesting things for me, as I said at the outset, was in a prior capacity, when I was doing policy work in state government in Missouri, we saw a massive heroin epidemic.

If any of your listeners are familiar with the book, Dreamland, Jalisco Cartel, Black Tar Heroin. This was a huge innovation in the American opioid market in the 2000s, but particularly escalating in the 2010s. Much of that market has just been totally displaced by Fentanyl now. I don't recall having a single case in my time in the U.S. Attorney's Office where we had unadulterated heroin, where it was just heroin on the table, as opposed to just fentanyl, a fentanyl analog, or heroin cut with typically a preponderance of fentanyl. So let's talk about these supply chains then because to keep with the, you know, the Afghanistan comparison, Afghanistan was, depending on what part of the country you're in, you know, somewhere on a

spectrum between, you know, a failed state, Taliban control, or, you know, theoretic government control with NATO troops, you know, supervising in effect, still mostly a lot of opium production. It's a chaotic place, in other words, where the rule of law was not, or the rule of anyone was a complicated question. This is not the case of China. China is, whatever it is, it's not a failed state. I think plenty of the conversations we've had on School of War in the last couple years

go to show that the central government, China is pretty powerful, very much in control of the country. So why is this happening? How is all this fentanyl or its precursor chemicals originating in China and ending up in the United States? So China's chemical industry and its pharmaceutical production industry is massive. In terms of global supply chains around all drugs, legal and illegal, China is really at the epicenter along secondarily with India. We mentioned before, we talked about before, that fentanyl was originally synthesized by Jansen in 1959. Jansen had a plant in China, I believe it was in Habe Province years and years ago, and China actively sought in the earlier era of its economic modernization,

co-location of pharmaceutical plants in China, the same way it did with many other advanced industries. Now, fentanyl is not currently subject to patent protection, so it's different in some respects than the IP theft issues we've seen in other industries with China. But China was very intent on learning how to manufacture pharmaceuticals decades ago, and their industry is very advanced and very sophisticated as a result. One of the biggest exporters of fentanyl precursors in the world is a company called Yuan Cheng. which is, it's not a small company. It's considered a major industrial champion in China. Its founder has won all kinds of awards from the Chinese Communist Party. It employs literally

thousands of people. And it ships kilograms and kilograms and kilograms of fentanyl precursors basically direct to the cartels in Mexico. You compare fentanyl in China, where there's, clearly the Chinese government has not been able to get the fentanyl and fentanyl analog production problems there under control. You compare that with methamphetamine, which has a real domestic market in China, a lot of Chinese users. And the Chinese government has been rigorous in its crackdowns and domestic production of meth is almost unheard of in China. So there's clearly an element here, I believe, and I think most observers believe, of the Chinese government choosing to not do nearly as much as they could when it comes to

cracking down on fentanyl and fentanyl precursor production in its territory. Can we speculate a bit as to why that might be? I mean, we are, you know, ultimately dedicated to better understanding war on this podcast. And in the West, you know, we have this sort of paradigm that we approach the question with, which is that the natural state of things is peace. And then a war breaks out and you fight a war, you know, generally with militaries. There might be some stuff that comes along with that. There might be propaganda.

There might be intelligence operations. But what tanks and soldiers and jets are doing is the main business. And then you go back to being peaceful again. It strikes me that the Chinese may not look at things precisely the same way and that there may be some background here to the question that suggests why fentanyl might appear to them to be an elegant weapon and tool of competition. And to understand the Chinese view on opioids,

I think you really do have to go back to the opium wars in the mid-1800. As many of your listeners probably know, in 1839, the first opium war kicked off, which was a dispute between Britain and its champion the East India Company with the King dynasty, which was then dominant in China over the distribution of Indian opium through Chinese held ports. And that war results in the Treaty of Nanjing, which the Chinese view. is the first of the unequal treaties between the West and China and the start of their national humiliation that they now see themselves on the path to vengeance for, essentially. There was a second opium war that was fought between Britain and France on one side and the Chinese on the

other in the 1850s. The result of those two wars was a flooding of the Chinese market with with opium. By the early 20th century, one and four Chinese men were addicted to opium. It was considered a huge social problem in the country. One of the first priorities of the Chinese Communist Party when it took power in 1949 was the eradication of opium used domestically. There was a King Dynasty official who had led the charge in the 1800s against opium. His name was, I think, Lin Zay-Zew. He was, butchering that pronunciation, he was elevated to sort of national hero status as the one Chinese man from that era who saw the future and was aligned correctly. But the CCP was vigorous at breaking the opium trade and breaking opium addiction and did so very successfully. What we've

seen in the modern era, though, as this trade in opiates has picked up, is a Chinese willingness to leverage fentanyl and other related issues in the context of broader trade negotiations. When Nancy Pelosi went to Taiwan a couple years ago, one of the ramifications that the Chinese imposed on the United States for that was a withdrawal from cooperation on fentanyl crackdowns, a withdrawal from drug control collaborations, essentially. So the Chinese view fentanyl and and the exporting of opioids to Western countries as one of a series of levers, whether that's trade, military, diplomatic, et cetera, but it's part of their overall picture, that they view this as a tool that they have in terms of structuring and structuring their relationship with

Western countries and ultimately structuring and competing in the great power competition that they are currently engaged in with us. As early as 2014, there was a, Socom white paper that discussed Chinese military officials referring to opium or to opiates as a, as a weapon that China could use against the West. If you follow kind of Wolf Warrior diplomats and this new younger generation of highly aggressive Chinese governmental officials, many of them talk in similar terms. And from what I've been told, I'm not, I'm not a Mandarin speaker, but from what I'm told on WeChat references to China, poison. the West as revenge for the opium wars, that that sort of speech is commonplace, and Chinese

censors do nothing to limit that or restrict that kind of speech. So overall, I think the picture that emerges is a country with a deep historical perspective on this issue and a willingness to leverage this issue to achieve its diplomatic, military, and political ends. So talk a bit about, if you would, some of these other levers, like help us fit fentanyl into the bigger picture of Chinese strategy here. You mentioned military competition, trade competition. I mean, there are these other issues, too, which are very much in the news. And I think to the average guy in the street probably appear more like domestic political issues. Like fentanyl, for the most part, you know, kind of reads as a domestic law enforcement sort of social health issue.

TikTok is another one, right? which, you know, it might, you know, just come across you're like, wait, what the government wants to ban, you know, a social media company? This seems odd, you know, but in a way, this is like very much related to what we're discussing, right? Yeah, and look, some of this, just to, Winston Churchill once described Russian intent as a, I'm going to butcher the quote, but a riddle wrapped inside, a mystery wrapped inside an enigma. There's an aspect of that with China as well, that it's very difficult to know what exactly Xi Jinping intends versus what some of his subordinates may intend. And it's all a bit of guesswork. What we do know, though, is that China is responsive

on this issue when it's pressured. So in 2017, the Trump administration took the then unprecedented step of indicting a number of Chinese pharmaceutical executives for deaths that resulted from fentanyl here in the United States, China then began engaging on the fentanyl issue directly, leading to, as I said before, the scheduling within China, the banning within China of fentanyl and all of its analogs. That all happened, though, concurrently with major trade negotiations. Trump was at the time attempting to seal sort of the grand bargain on trade with China. And I think the best view of fentanyl in that context is that China saw it as a bargaining chip that it could waive towards the Trump administration to make them more favorable on issues that China saw as more existential in terms

of the potential decoupling of the Chinese economy or aspects of the Chinese economy from the U.S. economy. And then obviously the broader political issues around Taiwan, then Hong Kong and China's plans for the region. Yeah. I mean, you point to something that's worth reflecting on, which is the sort of understanding of a place as complicated as China's behavior and what's actually driving it. You know, on the one hand, you don't want to assume that there's no politics, right? And that it really is just this clean, crisp, purely totalitarian decision-making process where everything that happens is somehow downstream of a considered set of strategic decisions.

That seems just on the face of it unrealistic. On the other hand, it does seem to me to be the case that, especially living in an open society as we do with the policy, making processes as messy as it is. And of course, the great joke is that Putin's and she's at the world sort of, you know, see someone waving a flag somewhere else in the earth and assume it must be a CIA operation. You know, whereas we know that American government just doesn't function that way. Like you watch the Jason Bourne movies with the bad guys with these shadowing government operatives that I remember thinking, well, gosh, you know, I've seen the real thing.

And I'm going to tell you right now, they're not nearly as good as they are in the born movies. But, like, it's possible to look at our open society, right, and assume, you know, to then sort of impose that on countries where things actually are more controlled and sort of miss links that might seem conspiratorial, but might also be real. Like to me, I'm curious to know your view here. Like, it seems hard to imagine considering, you know, the lethality of fentanyl, its origins, the way the Chinese talk or don't talk about it effectively. And then you look at that and you look alongside what is happening with TikTok, for example, and the kind of information, both the sort of the espionage aspect of the TikTok question, and then the sort of

information warfare aspect of the TikTok question, whether latent or real. It's hard for me to look at these phenomena, and then there are other phenomena that we could discuss alongside of them and not think that at some point, somewhere, like at a conference room in Beijing, there was a conversation and a plan approved where either things would be caused to happen or at least permitted to happen that would destabilize American society, right, as the ultimate goal. On one level, that sounds crazy. At another level, it's hard for me to believe it's not true. Well, and I think TikTok's a very interesting comparison because it's similarly to the situation

we have with drugs, it shows very different Chinese behavior when it comes to managing their domestic markets versus the product they're willing to inject into global markets. So with TikTok, social media in China for children is very strictly delimited in terms of the time that children can spend on these apps and the sort of content that's pushed down onto them. In America, any 12-year-old or whatever can get on TikTok and see all kinds of crazy stuff, including obscene materials that would never be allowed in China. Similarly, as I mentioned before, China has taken extraordinary steps to, to destroy domestic manufacture of methamphetamine

and destroy the distribution networks of methamphetamine in China, which were previously a real problem there, while they've allowed the analogous infrastructure for fentanyl, which is not a domestic problem, to grow and grow and grow, and indeed have subsidized the export of fentanyl precursors. China has a regime of that rebates,

value-added tax rebates on export, that allow them to, with a fine degree of precision, incentivize some exports over others. And the VAT rebates on fentanyl precursors have historically been very, very high, just about, I think, 16%, the highest you can get in the Chinese trade scheme. So there's clearly a degree of intentionality

around fentanyl exports, the same way there is with the TikTok product that they put on the streets here. And there's also clearly steps that the Chinese could take to ameliorate the problem for the West that they've chosen not to take. And so that gets into a malfeasance versus nonfeasance question. And we don't need to be overly philosophical about it. But the fact of the matter is that there are tens of thousands of Americans that are dying every year who would not be dying if China took totally reasonable steps with respect to their pharmaceutical industry during the height of. of COVID when much of Hua Bay Province and the Wuhan area were under strict lockdown,

that happens to be where much of Chinese pharmaceutical production happens. Street prices of opioids on American streets skyrocketed due to a limited supply. So the Chinese can stop this and it can have a material effect very quickly in America. They've just chosen not to. Yeah. No, the historical perspective you provided with respect to the opium war seems to me to just kind of seal the deal on the theory that there's some level of intentionality here, you know, that it just never occurred to the Chinese Communist Party and its senior leadership, how elegant it would be

to push towards an America that was addicted to a, you know, form of an opiate while meanwhile, like mindlessly scrolling through their phones, especially young people getting dragged down these terrible rabbit holes on TikTok into, you know, whatever crazy subject matter, the algorithm is pushing on them, you know, meanwhile. while our factories are rusted out and closed because the Chinese have cornered the market on this or that form of manufacturing. It never crossed their mind, like that this would be, you know, an advantageous set of outcomes for the Chinese Communist Party if that party's goal, in fact, is to, you know, pass the United

States in a global competition. It just strikes me as fanciful, but it's not the case. Well, I think when you listen to Chinese leaders, they're so historically minded and so much of their historical frame of reference starts with the opium wars and the initial humiliation of China at the hands of Western powers that have led to what they consider to be this extreme historical abnormality where China is not at the center of the world, whereas for thousands of years before it had been, to me, as you said, it would defy all rationality for this not to be at least something that they're thinking about. And as they proceed to,

to attempt to weaken us in the context of great power competition, it's poetic and also clearly effective for them to be doing exactly what they're doing to us. So you're both a law enforcement professional and a policy guy. So what should we do about, we can start with fentanyl. China's a big question, though I am curious to know what you think we should do about China, but what should we do about fentanyl? What law enforcement sort of domestic tools are available to us that maybe we are not using sufficiently? and then as a matter of international relations, what more could be done?

I'll start with the latter. I think when you look at American negotiations with China over the last several decades, China always likes to break things down to specific verticals, that they don't want to negotiate over a particular diplomatic issue. They just want to negotiate about trade, or they don't want to negotiate about a particular trade issue because that doesn't bear on the Spratley Islands or whatever diplomatic issue is at the table. The success of the Trump administration with respect to China, in my view,

was their willingness to combine everything together. So it wasn't a negotiation on just on diplomatic issues or just on trade or just on military issues, but the Trump administration saw all of that as interlinked, but much the same way that China views it all is interlinked. I think that in any future trade negotiations with China, as we consider whether trade relations with China will remain at least somewhat normalized, whether China will be allowed to continue profiting from the WTO system that we allowed them to gain admission to. I think the drug issue needs to be paramount, that if China wants access to our markets, they also have to be willing to take steps to deny access to our markets to bad actors like the cartels who they're now supplying.

I think in a broader sense, though, we as a country need to be cognizant of the fact that this has the potential to wreak untold havoc on our cities. We're just a few years into the fentanyl epidemic, and we've seen drug overdose deaths have doubled since 2015. 2015 may have doubled from the early 2000s. I mean, how many people can we really afford to be losing, particularly young people, who the drug epidemic disproportionately affects, if our country is going to have a future, I mean, what's the number? Is it 100,000, 200,000, God forbid, half a million people a year? This doesn't get better unless we take a whole of government approach to combating crime and combating the drug issue. I think that the Trump administration and now Republicans in Congress

talked about declaring the cartels, the two principal cartels, Jolisco and Sinaloa, as, as terrorist groups, which would give us new tools to combat them. I think that's an excellent idea. I think securing the border and our ports of entry more generally, we need to do that. Restricting supply is ultimately going to be, I think, our most effective immediate or near-term lever. And long-term, we need to think about wide demand for these incredibly powerful drugs is where it is in American society. And that's more of a question of the kinds of social ills that probably beyond the scope of this podcast. But these are part of a much broader category of deaths of despair, skyrocketing suicide rates, young people feeling, I guess, what Durkheim would call

Anna Me, just disconnection from society. And that's a much broader question, but a very important question if America is going to have a bright future. Yeah. It occurs to me, we kind of skip past the cartels quickly in the course of our conversation so far. And that's, that's on me, because I was driving us towards China, but this is obviously like a critical part, I mean, a critical literal part of the supply chain, but also an important part of the story because it's generally speaking right, not Chinese networks, you know, importing the drugs into the United States and manufacturing, distributing them. So talk, you mentioned the two main cartels.

Talk about who they are, how they operate. Again, you know, feel free to make reference to your, you know, you were kind of looking at things that were downstream of the work of these cartels in your work in Missouri. How do these cartels go about their business? So the Sinaloa cartel controls a huge portion of the border. Jalisco cartel, which is the other one that people talk about in this context, it's geographic base is further south in Mexico, but is involved in transnational trafficking of drugs.

Previously, there was a serious amount of poppy cultivation and heroin manufacture in Mexico. In the early 2000s, that was a huge issue. The Mexican government got pretty good at poppy eradication. And that's when you see the current trend emerge, which is the cooking of precursor chemicals into opioids in industrial-sized labs in Mexico. The presence of ungoverned space or space that's not governed by the Mexican government within Mexico is really what allows this to occur. The cartels aren't particularly secret about it. Drugs are then trucked over the border, typically through ports of entry, although sometimes smuggled, you know, with humans just across the open border, illegal immigrants and part of that whole,

part of that whole dynamic. But most of the drugs, we believe, come through ports of entry, smuggled by trucks or cars by the kilo or multi-kilo shipment. Those drugs then make their way all across America through pretty well-known smuggling routes. St. Louis, where I work, if you track I-44 up from Texas, Oklahoma, up through St. Louis, and then, from St. Louis, you can pick up northbound highways up to Chicago. That's a very well-known drug trafficking rate that's been through multiple iterations of the drug war has been a crucial one. But the stuff gets from the border eventually out, out to the coasts, out to the biggest cities in America. And that's, and then is sold on typically to local, local gangs and local

distribution networks. If you think of the kilo of fentanyl in Mexico, is probably worth about $5,000. Its street value as sold to end users is probably about $1.5 million or more. So there are multiple orders of magnitude of value add the second you get the product across the border. And that means unless we're interdicting a huge percentage of this stuff before it makes it on to American streets, people are going to be willing to take the risk and the drug trade is going to continue because the rewards are just so outlandishly large.

Can I ask kind of a, it's like a, it's actually, as I think of it, it's like a dumb question, but I'm curious to know how you, how you answer it, which so much money, right? We're talking about so much, just vast amounts of cash being generated or be transferred, right, as a consequence of this trade. Where principally is it going? Are the cartels the ultimate financial beneficiaries here by sort of by volume, if you like, of dollars? Like, how does the financial aspect of all this work?

the two biggest beneficiaries are the cartels and the Chinese pharmaceutical industry. This also funds an incredible amount of violence on American streets, drug gangs warring over particularly favored corners or customers. That was a lot of the work that I did was going after neighborhood gangs that were particularly violent, that were engaged in other crimes. You see it pop up in weird areas. I prosecuted two bank robbers who robbed, I think it was seven banks, and their goal was saving up enough money or stealing enough money so that they could buy a big fentanyl package and get into the drug distribution game at a higher level than they would otherwise be able to. So from a pure financial perspective, I think that the two key groups that are getting these outsized profits are going to be the cartels that are handling distribution into America.

and then ultimately the original manufacturer of the precursor chemicals in China or India to a lesser extent. But the result is acutely felt on American streets in more ways than just overdoses. It's a huge driver of violence, a huge driver of crime on our streets. You used this phrase a few minutes ago, the war on drugs. And you and I are not that far apart in age. And I grew up with the war on drugs. And then I've watched in recent years as, I mean, obviously for a long time, the Democratic Party, it seemed to me, was skeptical of and hostile to that framework and that way of looking at things. And then recently on the right, there's been a fair amount of debate about drug policy and about, well, criminal justice policy more broadly.

Should we be thinking about this domestically as a war on drugs? Like, what is the right framework to look at this problem? Is that metaphor do more harm than good? So many have argued. How do you think about this? Well, so one of the interesting side note is that one of the criticisms leveled by the Chinese against us in this context is that by going down the path of drug legalization, we have confused international law around trafficking to such an extent that they claim to be powerless

to do some of the things that we would want to do. Now, I think that argument is bunk, but it is something that Chinese diplomats have thrown in our face. as we've attempted to get them to engage on opioid issues. In terms of the broader question that you're asking, when we think about the war on drugs historically, the drugs that we've really been talking about, the most dangerous drugs have all been coca derivatives.

And those are grown in very small areas of the world. The idea was always that if we could get the Colombian cartels under control, if we could get the supply of cocaine into this country under control, that things would just get better. The issue that we have now with synthetic opioids is that they can be cooked anywhere, that all you need is a chemical lab and a college-level understanding of chemical interactions, and you can produce the most dangerous substances in the world. So the war has shifted, and it's definitely not like the war that we fought in the 80s and

90s at the height of what we consider to be an American intervention abroad on the drug issue. There are some who say that legalization is the correct path. I think given the substances we're talking about, legalization just isn't a viable answer. The human cost of opioids is just so great that I don't think we have any choice but to ban them the way that we have. And if we're going to make them illegal, we have to enforce those laws with every tool at our disposal because the alternative is just too ghastly to imagine. The number of deaths is not driven by enforcement actions against drugs. It's driven by the drugs. And if you legalize the drugs, you're going to get more drugs. So we're at a stage where I think all people should be able to agree that fentanyl and fentanyl

analogs that can kill you with a couple specks of sand, this isn't stuff that we can just allow to be unregulated on our streets. And it's worthwhile. for the government to engage in this, not just from a harm prevention standpoint or a medical standpoint, but from a law enforcement, diplomatic and ultimately a military standpoint. Will Sharf, you are a great American. Thank you for coming by today. Thank you for your service as a federal prosecutor. And good luck to you.

Good luck to you on the trail out there here in the year to come. Thanks a lot for having me. Truly an honor to be on my favorite podcast. And looking forward to hearing more great. things from the School of War. This is a nebulous media production. Find us wherever you get your podcasts.