Clowns are doing their due diligent best to provoke and make something somewhere, anywhere happen. Strongholds are being shut down systematically. This I believe is where Watch the Water comes into play!
US Security Experts Raise Questions About China’s Fentanyl Promise
WASHINGTON—China has pledged to stem a flood of the synthetic opioid fentanyl onto America’s streets, where it kills thousands of people a month, but U.S. security experts are skeptical about whether Beijing is willing, or even able, to follow through. Ten current and former U.S. officials, congressional sources and China and trade experts told Reuters in interviews that China cooperates only when it believes it will get something in return. In this case, several said, Beijing appears to have offered its help so that it could get the best deal possible from Washington in trade negotiations. “Will they enforce this, or is this just another gesture to be used to secure something they want?” said Robin Cleveland, vice chair of the congressional U.S.-China Economic and Security Review Commission, which monitors the national security impact of bilateral trade and economic ties. “I think they would hope to leverage it in some meaningful way in the context of trade talks,” she said.
Those trade talks ran into trouble this week with China backtracking on earlier commitments to change its laws in key areas, including intellectual property rights, trade secrets, forced technology transfers, access to financial services and currency manipulation, Reuters reported on May 8, citing U.S. government and private-sector sources. President Donald Trump responded to China by vowing to raise tariffs on $200 billion worth of Chinese goods from 10 to 25 percent on Friday. Unless resolved in a new round of negotiations, the mounting tensions over trade could derail China’s cooperation on fentanyl. “They are not going to do it, the record says, unless they get a trade deal, or we threaten them in the absence of a trade deal,” said Derek Scissors, an expert on Sino-U.S. economic relations at the American Enterprise Institute think-tank. “They can stop this if they want, but they won’t unless they see a deal.”
An explosion in the use of fentanyl, an opioid painkiller 50 times more potent than heroin, and its analogues has driven the most devastating chapter of America’s long-running opioid crisis, U.S. law enforcement agencies say, and China accounts for most of the fentanyl and fentanyl analogues seized. The United States recorded more than 28,000 synthetic opioid-related overdose deaths in 2017, according to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the majority of them fentanyl-related.
Chinese leader Xi Jinping promised Trump at a summit in Argentina in December that Beijing would crack down on flows of all fentanyl-related substances. In April, China pledged that from May 1 it would expand the list of narcotics subject to state control to the more than 1,400 known fentanyl analogues, which have a slightly different chemical makeup but are all addictive and potentially deadly, as well as any new ones developed in the future. Fentanyl and all of its analogues are controlled substances subject to strict regulation in the United States. China’s Ministry of Public Security, National Health Commission and National Medical Products Administration—the departments responsible for the new rules—did not respond to requests for comment on this story. The White House did not respond to requests for comment.
The regulatory change is supposed to shut down the operations of illicit producers and traffickers who advertise and sell fentanyl products on video websites including Google’s YouTube and Vimeo, and on the Dark Web. They deliver the drugs to the U.S. market mainly in the mail, through express delivery services or trans-shipping them through Mexico and Canada.
Trump’s attorney general, William Barr, has said it is too soon to claim victory. “Whether the Chinese … actually deliver on it from an enforcement standpoint remains to be seen,” Barr testified at a House of Representatives budget hearing in April.
https://www.theepochtimes.com/us-security-experts-raise-questions-about-chinas-fentanyl-promise_2916293.html