Fentanyl came in from China for years before they moved the synthesis to Mexico. I was active in online drug forums before, during, and shortly after Silk Road. So many drugs came from China and their government didn't care. It would not surprise me if they encouraged it not just because of monetary gain, but because of political objectives. I have believed since 2010 that it was a form of warfare that they could plausibly deny. So much fentanyl was coming in for so cheap, it was crazy. I don't know anything about what's going on now, but they were practically giving it away back then
I was pretty skeptical about a lot of the negative press about China for a long time. Then the Chinese colonial takeover over Hong Kong went from soft to hard in 2019, during which they leveraged organize crime to try to quell dissent.
This made it very clear to me that organized crime is a wing of the Chinese government.
Before I probably wouldn't have believed a post like this, but now it seems enough in alignment with all parties interests that I find it more likely to be true than false.
Though I think it’s fair to distinguish between using organised crime during times of war against an enemies military vs using organised crime during times of peace to grind down a competing nations civilian population.
There's a lot more nuance than that. During Wartime, the Ładoś_Group would be considered organized crime; It was a passport-forging ring. During peacetime, "Radio Free Europe" was organized crime; The Soviet Union tried it's best to jam it.
Coming to agreements with local organized crime against foreign enemies is distasteful but pragmatic and usually a good; Even The Joker[1] had some patriotism.
Funding foreign organized crime can be used for good or ill. You can supply the black market with foreign goods to convince them that life would be better under new government (which the CIA did during the cold war), or you can supply drugs and weapons so they kill themselves off. One is an absolute sin; The other is more questionable but generally good.
Tangentially related, this reminded me of a documentary film on mass killings in Indonesia titled "The Act of Killing": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Act_of_Killing. It is an excellent film.
Basically it comprises interviews of gangsters who were recruited by the government to conduct mass executions of undesirable people, and the subjects describe some reasons for which the work was tasked to organized crime rather than to official government employees.
these undesirable people are people who look like me, indonesian of chinese descent. They way they told their murderous stories, they didnt even consider us as humans, not even on par with animals.
Numbers on the purge victims indicate that Indonesian Chinese weren't a main target, but like happened in Malaya what started as "get rid of the Communists", could easily be turned into "And all the Chinese are Commies, right?" - they also often happened to be successful businesspeople, so bonus if you owed them money.
In fairness, you could say this about the state security services in any major country. Criminals are useful, and will do stuff the state doesn't want to get caught doing.
I would imagine in the US the best parallels or examples would involve corporations or para-government entities (like political parties) leveraging organized crime to fight labor movements or civil rights movements. I would be extremely surprised if there weren't examples, but I don't know them off the top of my head.
The short version is that what makes a person their nationality can either be adherence to a set of values (civil society) or that their parents were that nationality (an ethnic society).
China is clearly an ethnic society. America is practically on the verge of civil war over whether they are primarily an ethnic (white christian) society (GOP), or whether they are a civil (rule of law, believes in human rights) society (the very imperfect DNC).
Civil societies aim for everyone to be an "us," while ethnic societies have a strong idea of "us vs them." So when these societies ask "how should resources be distributed?" Ethnic societies tend to believe they are in competition with everyone else for all resources and they should try their best to attain as many resources as possible. This directly results in supremacist leaning beliefs and old world imperialism. Setting up British schools in India and taking all their resources is absolutely a supremacist policy, as is killing native Americans and taking their land. The fact that these softer forms of supremacy are not taught next to the holocaust is a disservice to the average persons intuitive understanding of what supremacy looks like and what kind of spectrum genocide exists along.
Ethnic societies are not governed directly by a set of values, so they tend to be ruled by dominance alone.
So from a jaded point of view America is an empire just as China is an empire, but from a forgiving charitable (extra emphasis on charitable) point of view, a Chinese empire is trying to suck all the resources of earth up in to china, while the American "empire" is trying to establish a set of laws and values that apply to all people (human rights) while trying to address the very real tragedies of the commons we are facing (over fishing, global warming, nuclear annihilation).
The reality though is that ethnic forces in america are strongly at work trying to achieve power, and liberal civil forces in america are extremely weak, so the "liberal world order" can be supplanted by "American supremacy" (America first), and we end up in a state where we look old wold imperialist via neocolonialism.
At the end of the day that means the most important thing for Americans to do is fight the ethnic party, and if we can't do that, then we don't deserve to exert our influence abroad, and should rightly be resisted.
They do offer a lot of goods.
And they do build lots of infrastructure abroad, like in africa.
Also the theoretic doctrin behind is communism for all people, not just Han Chinese. In practice it has of course become very nationalistic, but I really doubt they dream about ruling the whole world.
Some taoist thinking of maintaining a healthy balance between the forces is also still alive. They would like to become the dominant power, though and that would be arguably worse, than US dominance.
But I actually would prefer it, if no state has dominance over others.
That's extremely naive or jingoistic. American Empire means ravaging the world to generate profits for (some) Americans, while allowing some immigration and racial mixing.
That’s true to some degree but I think you will struggle to find a single nation who’s actions aren’t at least in some part fuelled by the personal desires of the political/business/military elite.
The use of organised crime happened on multiple sides of the issues that erupted in 2019. One has to ask why far right Ukrainians were spotted at the protests (sorry - not the best example perhaps given the current situation) it seems unlikely they flew here out of the goodness of their hearts to support democracy.
> it seems unlikely they flew here out of the goodness of their hearts to support democracy.
I think you vastly underestimate the power of ideas like "live free or die" and the solidarity of oppressed countries that live next door to fascist authoritarian regimes.
I'm a middle class American who wants for nothing and I have given serious contemplation to joining the military to protect Taiwan. When no one is willing to make sacrifices to fight for freedom, everyone will become enslaved. If I won't fight for others, they won't fight for me.
I think I'd need a bit more substantiation on "right wing Ukrainians in Hong Kong" to evaluate the point being made.
If you weren't skeptical of the government that made such wonders as one of the top 3 mass murders in human history, Mao, your either ignorant of history or ignorant of the many atrocities that communist china has always inflicted on it's own people.
I am a layman (definitely not a historian) who went to American public education institutions, so yes, you'll have to forgive ignorance of Chinese history. American education on china can be summarized in 10 words: "Confucianism, open door, Boxer rebellion, Dowager empress, Mao, Tienanmen square." none of which is analyzed from a critical or philosophical perspective and none in any depth enough to cause an emotional reaction.
Ironically public education spent more time talking about how all media lies to their countries and how we need to critically think about news to avoid falling prey to propaganda.
While I definitely have skepticism, it was primarily applied to the American media apparatus. I was skeptic because I don't trust that my government and educational/media institutions would give me the full story and that they would definitely lie and exaggerate for personal gain. American media has lied before, so it's important to be skeptical about what people want you to believe.
Hong Kong made it clear that I was too skeptical of western media and that a much better explanation was that foreign propaganda was sowing doubt and lack of trust in my own country and institutions. Hong Kong made it very clear that China is run by a very evil party and my government and institutions probably aren't lying to me as much as my younger self thought.
So while you told me I was ignorant in an inflammatory way, it was the case that I was ignorant of Chinese history and seeing it unfold in real time has given new perspective. Having spent well over a year in various parts of Asia, I am now much less ignorant of Chinese history.
There's no reason to dedicated domestic PRC resources to crackdown (technically) legal cancer drug manufacturers to subsidize US/DEA war on drugs. Priority is to crack down domestic drug trafficing in PRC / golden triangle. The entire reason synthesis moved to Mexico with PRC precursors was because past US admins politically pressured PRC to do something about it. Like if PRC wanted to be politically belligerant, they'd start exporting directly again.
The Chinese government was working with the US government to crack down on drug smuggling.
However, the US government keeps hitting them with more and more sanctions, and is calling the entire One China Policy into question, so China stopped cooperating on a range of issues, including drug smuggling. The US government says it wants to separate these issues out, but the Chinese government doesn't want to go out of its way to help a foreign government that's actively trying to destroy the Chinese high-tech industry with sanctions.
Nowadays, the precursors go to Mexico, essentially in unchecked volumes. A widespread network of tiny independent producers then manufacture a kilo at a time in little shacks all over the place, selling their stock to the cartels, who handle transportation to the US market.
Similarly with buying up real estate in various countries, notably Canada, where they can maintain an upward pressure on prices relatively easily - while acquiring actual land and buildings of at least some value - in order to cause undue and unsustainable suffering for Canadians, which then not only weakens the economy but political structures; and hey, we already also pay the most in the world for telecommunications.
Because of endemic "do as I say, not as I do" / hypocrisy. Each nation can dig out a ton of dirt on the other when needed and would give no rats ass about the fact that it did/does/will do the same thing.
i was active in such places pre-SR only. i remember when china banned mephedrone because of uk's demand caused by large number of fatal overdoses in uk.
china banned production of mephedrone - that was well known. the thing is - 4 of 5 labs get special permission to still produce it. that was unknown to general public.
I think this point is underrated (albeit a bit unrelated).
If China is looking to abuse the world in the way it has been abused, and to cause humiliation to others the way it has been humiliated, then getting the nations workforce to spend their time sitting in front of a computer doing an almost entirely unproductive activity for hours on end, creating a dopamine high that most other activities and certainly hard acitivities like studying can't compete with, then video games share an aweful lot of properties with opium. Real money for digital currency or goods is also something that is ridiculous enough it should probably be heavily regulated.
And Instagram and Twitter and all the other domestically-produced mind-addling time-vampires? I understand looking for "real motives" but getting people addicted to stupid things is a very common business model everywhere under our economic model.
Just a note:
The money-laundering system this criminal is part of is called a 地下钱庄 in Chinese or "underground banks" (https://fintrac-canafe.canada.ca/intel/advisories-avis/bank-...), originally started in the 1980s in Mainland China when free-market reforms brought non-regulated "banks" (more just a group of people calling themselves a bank) and informal "loan" companies/loan sharks, they were soon co-opted by corrupt officials to bring money out of the country and since about 2018 any Chinese citizen who wishes to bring money for big purchases like real estate investment outside of China uses a form of underground banking since China puts an annual limit of $50,000 USD on money that can be taken out of the country (https://nhglobalpartners.com/moving-money-in-and-out-china-r...).
Technically speaking, if you want to exceed the limit, you can send in an application form to explain and hopefully get approved to take out more money than that $50,000 limit but the original intent of this law was to restrict money flowing out of China and it is very hard to get approved beyond the limit.
It can be simpler than that even without banks. My own Chinese family “launders” money using similar mirror transactions, but a bit simpler. They often have cash coming from US restaurants and rentals, and they want to send that cash to their family in China, sometimes to invest into Chinese businesses. So first they find a Chinese person in Los Angeles (let’s call him Mr X Lee) who wants to receive cash from his family in China (let’s call them Lee family). My family gives Mr X the cash, at the same time asking his Lee family in China to give the same amount of cash to my relatives in China.
How can this still survive the constant crackdowns from Xi? The reason I ask is because I have relatives trying to move money out, and it seems near impossible now except for the allowable yearly amount, which is low.
If you’re willing to pay there are always ways to move value out. For example, buy $1M worth of t-shirts inside China. Sell for a 5% loss outside of China but say you sold at a 20% loss. Now you have money outside of China. You had to pay a decent fee and have a partner outside of China to do it but hey, that’s what gangs are for.
Ever wonder why both Chinese investors and the Saudi sovereign fund were prepared to pay huge premiums in valuations when investing in companies, even though it was apparent it was likely they'd make a loss?
This is it. If you have $100M inside China, can take a 30% loss but end up with $70M in the US that isn't a bad deal.
> Ever wonder why both Chinese investors and the Saudi sovereign fund were prepared to pay huge premiums in valuations when investing in companies, even though it was apparent it was likely they'd make a loss?
This is totally unrelated. If you’ve got money outside the country you’ve already won, the point is that Chinese people can’t freely participate in foreign funds.
For example, many funds (sequoia, light speed, etc) maintain separate independent China funds to which the Chinese are restricted. It should be obvious to say, but a Chinese person cannot easily get wealth out of the country using a Chinese investment fund.
> If you have $100M inside China, can take a 30% loss but end up with $70M in the US that isn't a bad deal.
That’s not what GP is describing. GP is describing fraud wherein you lie about your losses (take 5% loss, report 20% loss). Everything you claim you earned goes back to China, but the gap between reported losses and true losses stays outside the country.
Note that you still want to be investing in a somewhat successful business for this scheme, to minimize loss of capital.
What challenges are there in moving that kind of money around? I imagine if you're that rich you have a private banker that deals with any AML reporting that has to be done on $100M
Because despite what crypto MLM shills claim their “market caps” are, there’s no way to turn any amount of Bitcoin into serious amounts of money like hundreds of millions of actual dollars. Any attempt to liquidate that sort of dollar value out of crypto will quickly show what a sham the whole pyramid scheme of inflated value is.
Tether volumes on Tron and Ethereum would suggest that perhaps you may be incorrect. Probably not hundreds of millions of dollars at once if you aren't working with legitimate OTC desks who can handle that size but even if you work with the more sketchy p2p types it is possible to do 7-8 figure transactions.
China had more than 50% of Bitcoin's hashing rate. Most of it probably was to launder CNY out of the country. I suspect there is still some underground mining despite the clampdown. The days of large scale mining seems to be over, though.
With the massive trade surplus that China runs, why is it concerned about people taking currency out of the country? Is it purely a question of control of the population?
Not only taking currency out of the country, the same limit applies to bringing money into the country. The control is over foreign exchange. If you have a valid reason, buying a house abroad, going to study, go traveling, you can exchange foreign exchange beyond the $50k limit.
I'd say it has something to do with the policy placed when the country needed dollars in 70s and 80s, and no one is taking the risk of removing it. China doesn't want to free foreign exchange on Chinese Yuan, mainly because it has shielded its financial institutes from western hedgefunds attacks. The Chinese financial institutes are new, and not as sophisticated as the western counterparts, IMO, this has been something working well for China, and I would hope it can continue to serve this purpose.
The property market is way over-priced during the fast and furious two-decades quest to blow a credit tsunami.
Now that the credit tsunami looks to inexorablly ebb under its own weight, a looming population implosion, the party will have to prevent a collective cashing-out from the speculators they once rolled out the red carpet for. esp. in the form of offshore currency.
By trapping them in, to keep people from panic dumping.
The policy is pretty old at this point and there is no momentum behind changing it. It also helps curtail "hot money" (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hot_money) flows which can cause banking crises. Obviously there's the control thing you mentioned to keep elites in check.
Given China's known role in fentanyl production and now this revelation about the other end of the trade, could it be they view this as some kind of long-term payback for things that took place some 200 years ago?
Source: Smuggler Nation: How Illicit Trade Made America by Peter Andreas (2013)
> "Smuggling was also common practice for U.S. merchant ships penetrating the Chinese market for the first time... In the first decade of the nineteenth century, U.S. merchants would also begin to make inroads into the ilicit China opium market, much to the alarm of the British East India Company, which jealously protected its opium-smuggling monopoly. Jacque Downs, the foremost historian of the early U.S.-China opium trade, writes: "The Americans were marvelously ingenious in their exploitation of the commerce. They managed to circumvent both the East India Company's franchise and the Chinese Government's prohibition and carried on a very lucrative, if antisocial and ultimately ruinous trade." Dominated by a handful of players, opium smuggling by American shippers would become increasingly vital to U.S.-China trade relations, with opium sales generating the revenue to buy Chinese goods such as silks and teas. Many of America's most elite merchant families made fortunes in the opium trade: "Girard, Astor, Joseph Peabody of Salem, John Donnell of Baltimore, and the Perkins firm (now allied with Bryant and Sturgis) were among the largest shippers of the drug." "
Yes, legalization/decriminalization plus public health education campaigns and a ban on marketing and doctor kickbacks would probably destroy drug profits around the world.
If you read mandarin language posts (and even some semi-official ones), the answer is yes. It is considered "pay back".
Just as it is used in other countries, racial hatred and jingoism is also used in China for political and social control (or to justify immoral profits).
Sales within China would be much more tightly controlled and severely punished. It's about half way to funding Contras with crack sales in LA.
I guess you'll have no problem with the Uyghurs of Xinjiang nuking Fuping in Shaanxi then. Eye for an eye and all. Russia was part of the opium wars so maybe they just forget to secure an old warhead. Or India decides that the millions who died of Covid are China's fault and fail to stop development and delivery of a bio-weapon. Nice country... shame if something bad was to happen to it. Everything is transactional and zero sum, greed is good.
Oh, that's right it would be terrible and millions would suffer from terrorism through nuclear, biological, or chemical means so maybe enforcing your own laws equitably would be a reasonable plan?
"Some U.S. officials go further, arguing that Chinese authorities have decided as a matter of policy to foster the drug trade in the Americas in order to destabilize the region and spread corruption, addiction and death here."
It’s easy to say that if you lack the Chinese perspective. They point to the opium wars as the reason they failed to industrialize at the same time as other nations. And that they are still digging out of that hole to this day. With this perspective in mind, the motive to continue pushing fentanyl is clear. In the relentless Chinese narrative about their “5000 years of continuous culture”, 160 years is a blink of an eye to settle the score.
I mean the launderers just want to make money, that’s obvious enough. The argument is if the ccp is viewing this as payback by choosing to not catch the money in their banking system, or catch communication in WeChat, which they monitor. Turning a blind eye on purpose.
Are you aware that China had to pay silver (and ONLY silver) for opium? The motivation then was arguably only “to make money” even though the indolent effects of opium addiction was clear. The suppliers of narcotics always make money. As a modern day dealer with a grudge and a playbook, why not kill two birds with one stone?
Mark Twain made what I consider one of history's greatest puns when he described the American role in the opium trade as "Taels I win, heads you lose."
(A tael was a unit of Chinese silver bullion; heads references the death penalty for drug running, which applied only to Chinese subjects for most of the opium years.)
I've never encountered a situation where people need an excuse beyond "make a shit ton of money" to sell drugs.
I'll bet a lot of people involved in the fentanyl trade don't even know much about the Opium Wars anyways.
It's like claiming smuggling of liquor from Canada to the US during prohibition was Canada's attempt at getting back at the US for the War of 1812. Nahh.. they just wanted to make a crap ton of money.
> I'll bet a lot of people involved in the fentanyl trade don't even know much about the Opium Wars anyways.
I’ll bet you aren’t familiar with the grammar school Chinese history curriculum.
Besides, as a modern kingpin, think with scale! Recruiting goes much smoother when you can sell it as “you’re a soldier for the country, fighting an undercover war”. How many companies have “make money” as their mission statement besides Amazon?
The comparison to Canada and prohibition doesn’t pass the smell test. Given that the war of 1812 wasn’t predicated on getting the Canadians into a drunken stupor as a tactic of economic warfare.
Oh, and as far as USA vs British East India Company, it’s all “the west” in the end.
> The comparison to Canada and prohibition doesn’t pass the smell test. Given that the war of 1812 wasn’t predicated on getting the Canadians into a drunken stupor as a tactic of economic warfare.
Since we’re speculating freely anyway, why does the revenge have to come in the same form as the initial affront?
>Prosecutors charged him with leading a conspiracy that washed at least $30 million, a number backed by direct evidence. The full amount was likely in the hundreds of millions, according to law enforcement documents and interviews.
...
>“They had to know it was illegal,” Ciesliga said. “Just the sheer amount of money, and the volume and consistency and frequency, there’s no legitimate businesses that are moving that kind of money. Any alert anti-money laundering investigator would have detected this kind of activity.”
This article has been given folks conniptions over PRC influence in Americas / Unrestricted warfare memes. Honestly even given generous interpretation of 100s of millions as a billion, over the alleged timeframe (first courier picked up in 2016, we're talking about ~150M per year, aka a few hundred houses in a nice western city or a few thousand international university tuitions. Operation is peanuts. Especially vs 20B-40B per year drug trade in Americas, 20B per year PRC telecom scams, or the 100s of billion per year PRC capital flight racket. Doesn't feel large enough to be on PRC radar for domestic enforcement, nor is PRC short of $$$ to do influence OPs to need laundering via such schemes. That said, I'd like to see a more detailed accounting of PRC/Asian syndicate influenced footprint in the Americas.
Yeah these kinds of articles always have the tendency to exaggerate the scale of what they describe. People have been doing this kind of thing for the past 30-40 years, including using a serial number on a dollar bill as a token. None of this is really new except they identified people who want dollars in America (rich Chinese) that are willing to pay a premium for them.
1) The Colombian drug cartels export drugs to the United States;
2) Drugs are sold for dollars in the U.S.;
3) A cartel in Colombia enters into a “contract” with the Colombian
Black Market Peso Exchanger who is usually in Colombia;
4) The cartel sells its U.S. dollars to the Exchanger’s U.S. agent;
5) Once the U.S. dollars are delivered, the peso exchanger in Colombia
deposits the agreed upon equivalent (of U.S. dollars) in Colombian
pesos into the cartel’s account in Colombia; (At this point, the cartel
representative is out of the picture because he has successfully converted his drug dollars into pesos.)
6) The Colombian Black Market Peso Exchanger now assumes the risk
for introducing the laundered drug dollars into the U.S. banking
system; this is done through a variety of structured transactions;
7) The Colombian Black Market Peso Exchanger now has a pool of
laundered funds in U.S. dollars to sell to Colombian importers who
use the dollars to purchase goods, either from the U.S. or from collateral markets; and
8) Finally, these goods are transported to Colombia.
And this is still happening on the scale of billions in the LA fashion district, 47th street in Manhattan, electronics distributors in Miami, etc. There are some newer schemes where people involved in healthcare fraud who need cash to pay their "patients"/runners or want money the Medicare fraud investigators can't find will write checks in exchange for cash from drug sales. Essentially it's just being an intermediary for people who want cash and people who want to get rid of cash.
It’s almost as if handing a $600B industry to criminals might have been a bad idea. Instead of dealing with national level corruption, we could just end the war on drugs.
So you want to de-regulate Fentanyl, and let the chips fall where they may? How darwinian of you. I've seen what legally prescribed fentanyl did to my mom's mind during her battle with cancer, at one point she had to go into rehab, from legally prescribed painkillers, just so she could get another surgery a few months later (giving the cancer time to grow further of course). She admitted later to not remembering multiples months of certain years. No one should be able to touch that shit without a legitimate medical need, and even then it should be taken with extreme caution.
I'm all for "ending the war on drugs" with regard to marijuana, LSD, mushrooms and such, all the drugs that got banned because they were politically inconvenient at the time. But that doesn't mean ending all regulation for all drugs.
Most people wouldn't have gotten into fent if oxy was cheap/freely available. same with a big batch of heroin users.
from people I know in the recovery community, they say that getting off fent is way harder than other opiates and suboxone doesn't always work well enough, even at crazy high doses.
it's a disgusting drug.
we're seeing a similar pattern now where cartels are mixing crap like xylazine in. when the only drugs you can get on the street are literal poison, there isn't much choice but to use them.
that's why if pure injectable morphine was available, for free or close to it, I doubt new users would choose to move to fent; especially if fent wasn't easily available.
sure some people will always chose to use more destructive drugs. but we need to stop the next cycle of escalation.
and I don't think most people are advocating selling high dose opiates OTC at the corner store.
i'm personally ok with MDMA, cocaine, speed (pills not rock) being pretty accessible with some type of license limit system, and tools to avoid smurfing/create outreach for those high quantity users move into dependence.
Shot/smoked meth & opiates I think should be more controlled, but still provided for free as part of harm reduction & programs to reduce use.
Favorite quote: "I'd like to congratulate drugs for winning the war on drugs"
Related: new data from CO lends even more credence to legalization/harm reduction: pot use is way down (35% amongst teens)
First off, I’m very sorry about the suffering your mother (and you, I’m sure) had to endure because of this.
The idea isn’t ”if we legalize opiates and opioids, no one will ever get hurt from them again”. It’s ”when they are illegal, even more people get hurt”. Just like how alcohol is a substance that causes a very large amount of direct and indirect damage to its users and those around them, yet its prohibition in the US increased the net suffering substantially.
As long as there are opiates/opioids around, they will be abused in a self-destructive way by some (and they are cheap and easy to make, so they will be around as long as there’s demand). We’re currently trying to limit this through enforcing prohibition, which is not particularly effective and has well-known drawbacks. We could instead try to do the same with increased spending on education and treatment. Through that, we could make people less likely to want to use them, we could make people use them as safely as possible when they do, and we could make it so that less of the people who use them start to abuse them in ways that affect their lives negatively. Perhaps this would have better effect than criminalization, while increasing safety and decreasing associated violence.
Of course, this is all very complicated and messy, and every possible policy has negative effects and causes collateral damage. I’m open to arguments saying that this is not how it would play out. But I think the chances are better than with the current approach.
Big difference between vending machine at cost fenatyl, and Rx controlled harm reduction expensive-ish fenatyl... You don't get war on drugs stupidity with tobacco tariffs, and if alcoholics only have access to the opiate equivalent of pure vodka, those alcoholics are going to do a lot worse when they have access to a spread of options.
Today you still get it cheap and uncontrolled beyond the queasy uninitiated, you fund organized crime and you get more humans into horrible cycles of criminality when they didn't need to be.
> Your experience has to do with tighter regulation of legal fentanyl.
This framing is incredibly misleading, their experience has to do with access to fentanyl. Dropping tighter regulations of legal fentanyl would not have changed their experience, it would have brought their experience of fentanyl access to many more people.
Exposing people looking for fentanyl to such bad experience is not the reasonable or just outcome you present it to be. The physical side-effects and addictive nature of fentanyl means lapses of judgement by well meaning and reasonable people incurs far greater risk of irrecoverable damage than other kinds of bad choices allowed in liberal societies.
And narcan doesn't magically fix that, it only addresses one specific thing (overdoses).
Yes, narcan for overdoses. What way did you read that I thought it was for something else. Its a list of policy measures not a consecutive thought.
What do you have in mind then?
I’m worried about fentanyl poisoning to people that accepted a risk to take something else, but got hit with a speck of fentanyl instead. A fixed supply chain helps them.
You can help unintentional fentanyl poisoning victims without legalizing fentanyl to the general public. I don't see how that's related to fentanyl's supply chain, the supply chain is tightly regulated but enough is already available for medical use. Treating fentanyl poisoning and rehab definitely counts as medical use.
I'd prefer general/leisure use bans on fentanyl and an extensive crackdown on illicit fentanyl distribution.
Drug crackdowns on relatively harmless drugs like marijuana are severely hampered by public opposition to it and partly racist motivations: a lot of people will either not cooperate or fight back against the immorality of discriminatorily punishing the possession of a harmless drug.
That doesn't really happen for crackdowns on less morally ambiguous crackdowns like human trafficking or meth or barbiturates. People believe they are dangerous because they are actually very dangerous and it's not difficult to understand why. It doesn't suffer from a crisis of legitimacy that is critical to government power. The wrong message to take away from the failed war on marijuana is that the government cannot enforce any significant restrictions on substances.
"Wealthy Chinese who want to get around limits on moving money out of China “buy” the $350,000 from Li’s couriers in the U.S. They often use the U.S. dollars to buy real estate or pay for U.S. college tuition. "
You can buy real estate in the US in cash no questions asked? Is that true?
> A Form 8300 must be filed by any trade or business (including real estate) that receives more than $10,000 in cash in the course of a single transaction or two or more related transactions. It is not a SAR and is not used to report suspicious activity. Form 8300 is an information report that is required to be filed by any trade or business (such as a car or boat dealer) that receives in excess of $10,000 in cash in a single transaction. Therefore, if for any reason a real estate agent or broker receives more than $10,000 in cash from a buyer or seller in the course of a real estate transaction, the form must be filled out and filed, and can be found at http://www.irs.gov/pub/irs-pdf/f8300.pdf(link is external).
This is also usually how drug dealers get busted after paying cash for a car. It goes to the IRS and then basically every federal agency has it (DEA, FBI, etc)
Ah man. The dealerships do not appreciate a large bag of cash. I found a car that I wanted and got a cashiers check for it at my local bank. They wanted what I considered an outrageous amount of fees (like $8) to do it. So... I asked for cash. Nope - don't have that on hand... will take time, yada yada. At that point, it was the principal of the thing... and said fine, see you in a day or two. Eventually I got it - drove over to pick up the car, and the dealership freaked out. They took it. Filled out all sorts of extra forms. My Bride is correct - I am a dumbass. Won't do that again.
I suspect the "cash" referred in the article are actually 2 distinct things. First being literal dollar bills and the second being bank account balance.
When you buy a house using account balance no actual paper note is involved but it is referred to as "cash".
IRS considers many things beyond currency “cash.” See section 32 of the form where it has you quantify how much value of each of 6 financial instruments were received in the transaction.
If you’re expecting a wire transfer being a loophole, the cash has to get into the bank where the funds exist and they are required reporters for AML/SAR.
$10k seems really low. Like 1980s low. That's not even earnest money on a $1M house typical of California. That's a down payment on a car slightly nicer than a Civic today. Saw a Civic listed for $30k at the dealer last week.
There was a bill to raise it to $30k and reform various other parts of the Bank Secrecy Act that would have likely passed congress but then the Coronavirus hit and derailed the whole thing. Now with this whole Russia-Ukraine thing any effort to sensibly update reporting thresholds will probably never happen.
Yes, agents do minimal due diligence on the origins of cash. As long as buyer and seller are happy to make a deal, agents get paid and everyone gets what they want.
A friend of mine who is an interior designer in an affluent area has received calls from clients that go like this:
1. A Chinese couple showed up at their door with a suitcase of cash in the middle of the day offering to buy their house, on the spot. The cash value was about 2x the value of the home.
2. The client declined. They _just_ remodeled, why leave?
3. The Chinese couple gets upset, not understanding why paying 2x for a home on the spot isn't a sweet deal. They leave to go find someone else willing to take the cash to move out ASAP.
Why fudge when you can just buy a mcdonalds as an investment and make clean money on top of it? Or real estate and hire the services of a property manager?
Even better when the "impacted area" your visa is fixing is in midtown Manhattan and you solve the blight by building your own luxury pied-a-terre after moving Harlem 80 blocks south.
Let's say you sell a house for $1MM on paper where in reality you've accepted 2MM more in cash.
There's not much the government can do, but you now have 2MM in cash that you need to hide. The buyer knows you have 2MM, and who knows who they'll tell about it.
Now, if you accepted cash for the full value of the house and deposited it in a bank, then yes, the bank reports it for you, and the IRS - if it is a priority - would look into it.
The IRS got a massive funding boost recently. Let's see how they use the money in the next little while.
No problem with that. The reporting happens when you deposit the money. At that point the question is one of, "from whom did you get all this cash and how did they get it?"
Yes OK, but there is nothing illegal there is there? Just wondering what legal tools there are for the police/FBI to interfere. Maybe if they can prove collusion they can confiscate it? Or maybe it's enough to bog one down in trips "to the station" that require taking constant days off or legal fees that become a hassle.
You get added to a suspects list, subject to more audits and investigated, which even if your legit is an unpleasant cost itself, and with the amount of things illegal in reality, could still bust you for something nobody cares about, like having some hunting animal bust from great grandpa or whatever.
the payer was 123 Main St Trust who just bought the property at 123 Main St
the trade is over, it was compliant
when you make enough money the IRS stops being an adversary and that has nothing to do with how well funded the agents are. most of what the IRS does is not enforcement (in number of distinct roles, not frequency or headcount), it is collaboration with wealthy citizens. sooner you learn that, sooner more doors open up for you.
When your a wealthy citizen who the IRS understands and your integrated with the US political machine, yes, it's just tax paperwork. When your the kind of person with a lot of abnormal imbalances with cash vs. how they understand you, an outsider to the political machine, your audit score goes up and you get a lot more scrutiny in general, because your a high value target to collect more in taxes and such. You get more unpleasant interactions at any government interaction checkpoint. It's bureaucratic, but still unpleasant and could land you jail and to them, it's just another day at the job where the computer machine said to poke you more.
The person we are talking about here is immigrants with dirty cash basically, not doing it properly, a pretty different kind of person in the US gov's eye, and might be drug related, which is a great career boosting lead for their buddies at the DEA.
If you are a recurring subject of high value CTRs or CMIRs I think sooner or later you will get a friendly knock from the guys over at Homeland Security Investigations or maybe you'll notice one day you're being followed when you're driving. You still need to say on whose behalf the transaction was conducted in the form 8300.
Yes, the real estate industry successfully lobbied for exceptions to the KYC/AML laws. Whether we're talking about the Bank Secrecy Act or the Patriot Act.
It's not about the cash per se, it's big brother wanting to know how you got the money in the first place. If you can show it's all legal and taxes paid then no problem cash is fine. But of course as soon as you mention cash, eyebrows are raised "why would someone want to keep that much cash and not want to put it in a bank if they are all clean?"
Big brother wanting its lion share in everything you earn is the crux of it.
When your an immigrant and your money is from places with bad records, they can't really push too much beyond it, or tax you for money made out of the country where you were not a citizen or resident of the USA. Shitty undeveloped countries are essentially a laundry for cash in general.
TLDR: “Li and his fellow Chinese money launderers married market forces: drug lords wanting to get rid of dollars and a Chinese elite desperate to acquire dollars. The new model blew away the competition.”
Comment: Nation states have been waging asymmetric warfare for long time, this is not new. China has become a major player in the illegal drug trade by supplying money laundering and chemicals [1]. Oldest modern reference I am aware of on the topic as it relates to China is a book on military strategy written in 1999 by two colonels in the People's Liberation Army titled Unrestricted Warfare.[2]
Yes, "The First Opium War (Chinese: 第一次鴉片戰爭; pinyin: Dìyīcì Yāpiàn Zhànzhēng), also known as the Opium War or the Anglo-Sino War was a series of military engagements fought between Britain and the Qing dynasty between 1839 and 1842, during the Century of humiliation. The immediate issue was the Chinese seizure of private opium stocks at Canton to stop the banned opium trade, and threatening the death penalty for future offenders. The British government insisted on the principles of free trade and equal diplomatic recognition among nations, and backed the merchants' demands."[1]
I was going to guess they were thinking of the CIA's "Golden Triangle", which operated similarly and makes a narratively nice "turnabout is fair play" argument[1]
No, their entire economy revolves around exporting value-added goods.
They restrict currency movements, but that doesn’t work when you can ship out goods and deposit payments overseas. Drugs is one way to do this, but so is virtually any other good.
This doesn't seem to be the case here as most of the "value add" is occurring in the US. Bitcoin is another Chinese export that enable capital outflow, but China is taking a lot measures to crack down on it. I'm sure the Bitcoin miners that are still allowed to operate have connections in the CCP, but that doesn't mean the party itself is particularly happy about mining.
For drugs yes, but China is a machine that takes raw materials and manufactures them into finished goods. Just look for the "Made in ______" label on so many goods.
Sure there's lots of margins on the marketing side that's captured and retained wealthy countries, but China is capturing some percentage of so many finished products.
Exactly, so China exports goods valued at less than markup, and pockets the markup, resulting in a net cash inflow. This is what is referred to by the “trade deficit” between the US and China. The deficit refers to the fact that China is exporting less valuable things and pocketing the money, and not buying back as many US goods, resulting in a deficit that net moves capital to China.
I don't think they're complaining about drug dealers paying part of their forex bill for them. Colombia has done the same thing for the past 50 years too (Google "black market peso exchange" or "sinister window"). But they probably don't like that high level people can have assets they don't know about or can't touch when they're in the process of a big corruption crackdown.
It’s not just high level people moving capital our of China. It’s any well-to-do Chinese. Look at what happened to Vancouver. Basically a lot of people wanted to bring their cash out of China to avoid things like taxation, government crackdowns, etc. in general just protect their wealth because western governments are more predictable and friendlier to wealth inequalities.
But more importantly, all of that cash going to Canadian real estate and property owners is money taken out of the domestic Chinese economy.
The US funds these cartels with its ludicrous war on drugs. Decriminalization would fix so many things.
China gets to turn the historical tables on the Opium wars.
And it's not like the US/EU banking system isn't complicit in money laundering. When they get caught, they are handslapped a pittance. And we tolerated outrageous opium farming by the former corrupt Afghanistan government.
The US needs a rational policy to deal with its bored suburban teenager problem that is turning Latin america into a dual-continent mafia state that puts Putin to shame.
Rational and moral solution would be total free market... But I don't see that happening. Just too much power, control and publicity in totalitarianism.
Totally unregulated capitalism is what cartel wars are.
A prohibition on murder is a regulation. In a totally free market a corporation could murder to obtain market advantage. This is what criminal economics involves.
But of course free market zealots won't want to allow unregulated murder. There's no assurance of property rights (which is also regulation). So there are no true free market advocates, merely people that want to set the regulation boundary to the point that maximally benefits them.
The thing about the article is it talks about "it's hard to distinguish corruption and policy" in China. It seems like a large look at drug and money flows would say the same about the US, China and Mexico and look at the particular agencies in each nation where the corruption is concentrated.
> It seems like a large look at drug and money flows would say the same about the US
It is policy in the US. There are a number of simple policy changes that would make money laundering much harder for most. Start with anonymous corporation ownership.
Or you could get serious and enforce already existing AML laws against large banks. Of course then a lot of people who actually matter would be in trouble, and more would have to pay taxes, and we can't have that, now can we?
Meaningless. And the government does certainly know that (and could care less). The EU wants transparency around that but mostly for tax purposes and bureaucracy.
What matters is the cash-flow and transaction-flow. In this case, bank accounts, crypto transactions/exchanges, real-estate transfers, cash movement, etc...
There is a legal difference, of course, between "truly anonymous" and merely effectively so. I am including situations like the designated trustee knows who the owner is, and if subpoenaed, will disclose that the owner is an Isle of Man corporation with a Panama address.
Here is discussion about it for Delaware corporations, but my understanding is South Dakota is currently the most popular US state in which to incorporate for, uh, privacy reasons.
> is a legal difference, of course, between "truly anonymous" and merely effectively so
Which is an important difference when it comes to AML. We don't have anonymous corporations in America. Computers have made it easier to create and track daisy chains of entities, which makes tracing beneficial ownership difficult. But that's a far cry from it being U.S. policy to encourage that chaining.
> the designated trustee knows who the owner is, and if subpoenaed, will disclose that the owner is an Isle of Man corporation with a Panama address
They would also disclose the signer, likely a lawyer and/or registrar, along with the method and contents of communications with them. This is tedious. But one can only do one or two hops through these methods before running out of (a) people who will keep your secret without (b) losing your chain of ownership and with it control of the underlying asset.
Yes, if there's sufficient time, money and will, you can usually, eventually, run someone down in a particular case. In practice, someone has to want to do that.
There's an awful lot of opaque money flow in entities like this, and a lot of them fly under the radar.
You essentially said "what about HSBC" 'tu quoque' - whataboutism is a form.
I agree with you on the lack of evidence for implicating the Chinese government involvement with their quote from "some guy" - "why wouldn't they". rolling my eyes.
> ... this global criminal is working on behalf of the notoriously anti-drug Chinese government
Anti-drug inside their borders. They are very pro-drug everywhere else, especially the US [0].
Regardless, what's with the whataboutism? Yes, HSBC, like many other major banks, have been facilitating drugs and arm trade worldwide, but that is not the topic at hand, thus it is irrelevant to the discussion.
Fentanyl is a legal but controlled substance in the US. It is not malicious for a company to supply fentanyl to US hospitals.
But the bottom line is that blaming China or its government for private companies selling chemical precursors that may end up in street fentanyl is like blaming Canada for supplying US with deadly firearm precursors in the form of aluminum. Blaming Canada for our gun crisis is analogous to blaming China for our opioid crisis. Meanwhile, the Sacklers are sleeping soundly on piles of blood money.
It is a deeply unserious, and 100% politically motivated narrative. Just because it is incessantly regurgitated does not make it any less unserious.
> Fentanyl is a legal but controlled substance in the US. It is not malicious for a company to supply fentanyl to US hospitals.
This is a naive take, and one that proves that you didn't even care to read the article. These substances are not sold to hospitals, which should be obvious since hospitals do not import tons of opioids and chemical precursors in bulk.
Also, it hardly compares to Canada exporting aluminium. A more accurate comparison would be if Canada would export gunpowder to Mexico, and arm trade happened massively through the southern border.
> It is a deeply unserious, and 100% politically motivated narrative. Just because it is incessantly regurgitated does not make it any less unserious.
So banks, big pharma, and the US may be to blame, but China wouldn't? The US played drug politics for decades now, and China would not? That's an odd take. Even if this was all a huge smear campaign against China, ignoring the fact that the Chinese government would be interested in destabilising other countries is naive at best.
