The Peter Zeihan Podcast Series - India Complicates the US Fentanyl Crisis || Peter Zeihan

Episode Date: April 11, 2025

The 2025 US threat assessment has revealed that India is now a significant source of precursor chemicals used in fentanyl production, alongside China.Join the Patreon here: https://www.patreon.com/PeterZeihanFull Newsletter: https://mailchi.mp/zeihan/india-complicates-the-us-fentanyl-crisis

Hey, all, Peter Zine here coming to you from a snowy, foggy morning in Colorado. Today we're going to talk about something that came out in the new 2025 ATA, that's American threat assessment. And basically, it says that some of the precursor materials that are being used for fentanyl are now not coming necessarily from China, but from India. So, quick backstory, fentanyl, unlike cocaine, is a synthetic. It is manufactured rather than grown. and because of that it takes about four man hours, four to six man hours to make a single dose of cocaine

because you have to clear land, you have to grow the crop, you have to harvest the crop, you have to dry the crop, you have to then process the crop and eventually ship it north. A lot of involvement because it's an agricultural product. Not so with fentanyl. With fentanyl, you get your pre-pre- precursor materials. You process those into something called a precursor material, fancy. And then you basically cook the stuff in a lab for a week, and then you have several thousand, probably several, tens of thousands of doses that you ship north. It only takes a few man seconds to make a dose of

fentanyl. The problem is twofold here. The way the United States has chosen to go after fentanyl is number one to try to put pressure on the countries that are providing the precursor materials. The issue is that one of these countries is China, and the precursor materials are legal. You use them in any number of things from making insulation to medicine, so you can't, like, not produce them. And it's very easy for you to siphon off a very small amount to ship to the United States. So you're talking about things that are measured in leaders here. In fact, all of the precursors that were used to make all of the drugs, all the fentanyl that was intercepted at the U.S. border could fit into 33 oil drums. It's not a lot of material. Once this stuff gets to the

United States, it's repackaged and sent into Mexico, typically by just a pickup truck. And there it's distributed to the drug labs, which are just little facilities about the size of your average garage, typically in your average garage, where they're processed into the final drug and that's shipped north. And so what the U.S. does is it tries to convince the countries that are producing the precursors to not, and it tries to convince the countries that have the drug labs to have better security. And it's not that these are stupid plans, but they're not going after the low-hanging fruit. The low-hanging fruit is how you ship this stuff from China, the United States, and that's the post office. We've got a decent scanning system.

for small parcels, you'd probably be able to cut that link. But even that isn't going to do very much because the precursors are legal and they can come from anywhere. And this is where India is getting on it. One of the things that we see whenever we're fighting the drugs is we don't get good data until it's two years out of date. And so two years ago, India didn't make the radar at all. And the Biden administration and now the Trump administration are talking to the Chinese about trying to find out which Americans are doing this to crack down on the personnel. It's probably the better way to do it. And in the meantime, you squeeze the balloon, it just pops up somewhere else where it's legal. And then, of course, the border crossing from Mexico to the United States isn't really something that we can lock down. And even if we could, one liter of Finnish fentanyls enough to create somewhere between 50 and 100,000 doses based on the purity. So all you need is one dude in a backpack to get through to supply the entire country for a couple of days. And at the end of the day, there's no reason that there's long. labs need to be in Mexico anymore than the precursor materials need to come from China.

The stuff is ubiquitous. It doesn't take much of a capital investment to set up operations, and you can do it in Kansas just as much as you can do it in Mexico. And for the precursors, you can do it in China, you can do it in India, you could do it in New Jersey. So, the only real way to get fentanyl under control would be to address the consumption side of the equation, and that has always been a flaw in American drug policy.