China using fentanyl as weapon in 'unrestricted warfare' against US: former DEA special ops chief

A former top Drug Enforcement Administration official is warning that China is using the Mexican drug cartels to traffic fentanyl as part of a larger "unrestricted warfare" strategy to kill off America's next generation and supplant the U.S. as the world's preeminent power.

Derek Maltz, the agency's former chief of special operations, told Just the News the Biden administration has strong evidence of how China markets the precursor ingredients for fentanyl to the cartels and where in Mexico the production labs are based. But, he said, the administration is allowing cartels to operate freely across the U.S. southern border to move drugs and earn billions of dollars trafficking humans to create new cash flow for their fentanyl supply networks, a scourge claiming more than 100,000 American lives a year,

"We have synthetic drugs being made in these labs in Mexico," Maltz said during an interview Friday on the "Just the News, No Noise television" show. "We know where a lot of the labs are. We have to get way more aggressive, and we have to work with the Mexicans, and we have to hold them accountable to shut down these labs.

"We also have to shut down the chemical flow, the precursors that are coming out of China. That's why the cartels now are producing such large amounts of these synthetic drugs."

Maltz is calling for the cartels be declared foreign terrorist organizations to give the U.S. government more tools to fight fentanyl trafficking.

China's involvement in the fentanyl trafficking must be viewed as part of its larger national strategy to unseat America as the world's number one economic and military superpower, Maltz argued. "China has pushed their unrestricted warfare, they're using fentanyl to kill our future generation" he said.

"They're using the cartels as a proxy to destroy and destabilize our country," he added. "And it's working very well."

The DEA announced last month that authorities seized 379 million doses of fentanyl in 2022, up 94% from 2019. With many of the pills laced in such a way as to be lethal, that's enough of the drug to kill every single American, according to the agency.

More than 107,000 Americans died from drug overdoses in 2021, and synthetic opioids like fentanyl are the primary driver of such overdose deaths in the U.S., according to the CDC. A Stanford University study in the Lancet medical journal warned that U.S. opioid overdose deaths could reach 1.2 million by 2029.

China has used social media outlets as a key marketing vehicle to glamorize fentanyl use to America's youth, said Malt.

"I work with many nonprofit organizations, primarily Lost Voices of Fentanyl," Maltz said. "Who in America wants to see 13-year-old-kids dying in a bedroom from ordering pills on Snapchat and social media, then having it delivered to the house like it's a pizza?"

Maltz said he first began to see Chinese involvement in the drug trade targeting the U.S. about a decade ago while he worked for DEA in Mexico. The early efforts involved less lethal synthetic opioids, which eventually evolved to a more deadly fentanyl concoction in the last few years, he recounted.

"They now have turned over the dirty work to the Mexican cartels," he said.

DEA last month said the two primary producers and traffickers of fentanyl are the Sinaloa and Jalisco (CJNG) cartels in Mexico.

Maltz isn't alone in sounding the alarm about fentanyl or the roles that China and the cartels play in the current crisis.

"There is enough fentanyl coming over the border to kill every American multiple times over," Rep. Mary Miller, a Republican from hard-hit Illinois, told Just the News recently. "In fact, I would say that we're under a terrorist chemical attack."

Likewise, the U.S. Commission on Combating Synthetic Opioid Trafficking last year warned that China's most deadly threat to the United States at present wasn't its defense build-up or military aggression but rather its role in the fentanyl supply chain.

China is "pretty much the lone supplier of precursor chemicals and pre-precursor chemicals, which they are shipping to Mexico," commission cochair Rep. David Trone (D-Md.) told Politico last year.

"They know it's being shipped to Mexico, it's being done by Chinese middlemen who are selling it directly to the Mexican cartels, where it is being turned into fentanyl, which is then being mixed into other drugs like counterfeit pills," he said. "... It is coming into the U.S. by the hundreds of millions of pills, and the chain all starts in China.”

China has denied intentionally contributing to the fentanyl crisis, but most U.S. officials have dismissed those claims.

The Biden administration has raised its concerns with Beijing but has not taken direct punitive action yet. Republicans taking over the House this month have vowed action to force China to rein in the production of the chemicals and curtail its relationships with the cartels.

"Fentanyl is a drug that belongs in the operating room," Texas Rep. Brian Babin said in an interview on "Just the News, No Noise." "It certainly doesn't belong on the streets. It certainly doesn't belong in a capsule or a tablet disguised as another drug to be taken by some unsuspecting person. You could be thinking you're taking a Tylenol, and the next thing you know you're overdosing and dying on fentanyl."