When Sammy left her rural hometown in Sichuan over a decade ago to pursue a university degree, she was embarking on a path that would lead her to an entirely unexpected destination – the murky underworld of synthetic drug trafficking. As the first in her family to attain higher education, the English language graduate had dreams of becoming a teacher and putting her passion for foreign languages to use. Little did she know, she would eventually find herself an unlikely player in a deadly trade she initially knew nothing about.
After graduating, Sammy took a job at a chemicals company in the city of Shijiazhuang, tasked with selling various compounds to international clients online. Honing her English skills daily through customer interactions, she had no inkling the products she peddled so diligently were actually powerful synthetic opioids. “Maybe others are just like me…At the start we don’t know what we are selling,” Sammy reflected, admitting the lucrative earnings eventually caused her to turn a blind eye.
Sammy is one of potentially thousands of online sales agents working for shadowy Chinese pharmaceutical operations manufacturing and distributing illegal synthetic drugs like fentanyl worldwide, according to international law enforcement estimates. The US government has repeatedly accused China of being the origin point for a deluge of these cheap, potent opioids fueling America’s devastating overdose epidemic. Over 70,000 fentanyl-related deaths were recorded across the US in 2022 alone.
A recent congressional report claims state-owned Chinese enterprises are complicit, alleging they provide illicit drug subsidies while tens of thousands of online posts brazenly advertise narcotics and precursor chemicals. Beijing has consistently dismissed such allegations of enabling the trade. However, the United Nations estimates China could be home to up to 100,000 pharmaceutical manufacturers, highlighting the staggering potential scale.
“China has long had one of the most significant pharmaceutical industries in Asia, as well as one of the largest chemical industries,” said Jeremy Douglas, former regional director for the UN Office on Drugs and Crime. “While both industries are regulated, the challenge is significant given the sheer scale.”
For many like Sammy, stumbling into synthetic opioid sales seems accidental – at least initially. Others, however, are far more conscious of the deadly nature of their business from the outset. Each morning, Sara, an international trade graduate, scours social media peddling not just synthetic cannabinoids and party drugs, but nitazenes – a terrifyingly potent new family of opioids up to 50 times stronger than fentanyl itself.
“We have many customers in Britain and have cooperated with them many times,” she boasts openly. When challenged on the morality of dealing such dangerous substances, Sara is unrepentant. “I never ask customers how they use what I sell,” she responds flatly.
Sara claims sellers use deceptive tactics like mislabeling shipments and concealing drugs in innocuous packaging to bypass customs inspections and deliver across the UK via major courier services. The BBC has obtained tracking numbers Sara and other representatives provided as purported proof of successful illicit deliveries to British addresses.
With cheap labor, lax oversight and booming e-commerce, the synthetic drug trade has become a perverse new path to social mobility in China, according to Louise Shelley, director of the Terrorism, Transnational Crime and Corruption Center at George Mason University. “I have not seen such a professionalism and a corporate element in this anywhere else in the world,” she observed. “Criminal activity was a type of social mobility.”
Shelley’s researchers analyzed over 350 websites advertising fentanyl in 2020 and found nearly 40% were registered to legitimate companies clustered around the city of Wuhan. For the sellers themselves, the trade is simply another online business vertical to be exploited without moral compunction.
“Somebody needs it, somebody makes it, and I am just a middleman who lets customers know that I have it and what they do with it, I don’t care,” one woman stated with chilling indifference. “Then I figured out I just need to make money. I don’t know and don’t care. Everyone has their own needs.”
Another seller named Natalie specializing in fentanyl touted her ability to discreetly ship to the UK, saying “I have a professional shipping agent who packages goods so has a very high delivery success rate.” Others claim to conceal drugs in everything from dog food to industrial equipment to evade detection.
The rise of shadowy online drug bazaars and cryptocurrency has disrupted the traditional narcotics trade worldwide. “Synthetics like fentanyl have several advantages over traditional drugs – compact, easily shippable, pre-existing demand, replaceable. They’re attractive to traffickers,” Douglas said.
In response, Beijing has made gestures like banning all forms of fentanyl in 2019 and launching joint enforcement operations with the US in 2024. However, skeptics argue more forcible action is needed to shut down industrial-scale narco-manufacturers exploiting China’s regulatory blind spots.
With cheap synthetic opioids now flooding the global market and claiming lives in record numbers, the human costs of this illicit fungible trade are severe. Many casualties, like Sammy, are simply exploited cogs in a vast digital supply chain trafficking chemical misery for profit. Others are brazenly complicit merchants of death peddling the world’s deadliest drugs between continents with seeming impunity.
As capsules of lethal powders flow across borders cloaked in e-commerce packaging, it remains to be seen whether China’s avowed commitment to combating this burgeoning threat truly matches the scale required. Synthetic opioid dependence may be this generation’s defining drug scourge – and one arguably enabled by entrepreneurial opportunists within Chinese borders.