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In a recent CSIS commentary, a former assistant secretary for Western Hemisphere rightly called for new policy options to combat fentanyl’s devastating impact. She highlighted how combating fentanyl and its variants—the most potent opioids currently known—requires an immediate retooling of supply-side counternarcotics approaches that may have been appropriate in the past. And at a CSIS event in June, Director of the Office of National Drug Control Policy Dr. Rahul Gupta flagged that chemistry itself is the enemy: there are infinite innovations in how synthetic drugs can be made, and the final product can be transported in an envelope. They are right, and there are now new policy avenues to explore.
During a 30-year career at the State Department, this author served in Mexico as the director of the Merida Initiative, and after retirement as senior adviser to the 2019–20 Western Hemisphere Drug Policy Commission and a study by investigative group InSight Crime on methamphetamine and fentanyl precursor chemicals, released March 2023. This study examined the China-Mexico chemical trade, synthetic drug production in Mexico, gaps in Mexico’s law enforcement, regulatory, and practical enforcement of dual-use or proscribed chemicals, and methods by which these opiates reach the United States. The study’s findings and policy recommendations push against some preconceived notions and bureaucratic boundaries. But when a year’s fentanyl supply for a user is the equivalent size of a packet of sugar, innovation is needed.
Reckless statements by members of Congress and political candidates suggest that the U.S. soldiers should enter Mexico and “target” cartels, which control the fentanyl trade, an obvious policy nonstarter. Such a unilateral and militarized act across the two countries’ shared border would jeopardize relations with not only Mexico but also the rest of the world—and it’s not even the key to saving American lives. When it comes to synthetic opioids, it’s time to think differently about cartels (which currently are in flux) and the 1990’s model of their top-down control. The study posits, based on a deep examination of the chemical trade, a relatively horizontal production landscape of thousands of individual precursor importers and “cooks.” It therefore argues that “the key link that authorities ought to concentrate on might not be the cartels, but rather those who facilitate the international trafficking of chemical substances: the brokers.” Or, as InSight Crime founder Steven Dudley asserts, “cartels play but a limited role in what is part of a global economy of laboratory drugs that can be peddled by anyone with a cellular phone.”
These and other supply-side counternarcotics arguments clearly needed a reality check, and the Biden administration’s April 2023 “strengthened approach” strategy on fentanyl and other synthetics is a laudable corrective. The strategy underscores the importance of the fact that this is not a fight against plant-based products grown in a limited number of hospitable climates, controlled by a vertically integrated crime syndicate. How small the drug amounts are—and how correspondingly small the overall trade volume is, despite healthy profit margins—explain why production and distribution are harder to detect or control than cocaine, heroin, and marijuana’s bulky and visible cultivation, processing, and transport.
Therefore, the administration’s newly announced commercial disruption approach is essential. Many chemicals can be pre-precursors (i.e., used to make precursors that are successfully placed on international restriction lists) while having legitimate dual uses in commerce and industry. As noted, a vital area of enforcement focus must be the relatively small number of consignment carriers, brokers, and freight forwarders who manage chemical flows, and attention to issues of illegal shipments and diversions of legal chemicals. Given the precursor chemical trade’s full integration with the private sector, it’s also time to sharpen enforcement tools applicable to money laundering in this sector. A November 2022 Financial Action Task Force study of fentanyl and money laundering recommended training for host nation financial intelligence units, customs, and other anti-money laundering and counterterrorist bodies on “how companies (e.g., pharmaceutical and chemical importers) may be deliberately or unwittingly providing raw materials to organised criminal groups.” The study also recommends network analysis of the private sector to provide investigative leads stemming from inexplicably high financial amounts associated with licit imports or production. Finally, investigators in the United States should consider a closer eye on remittances, which have grown sharply in the past decade, and according to a Mexican think tank study from March, may in some cases be linked to money laundering.
The InSight Crime study made 40-plus policy recommendations for governments, multilateral institutions and diplomats, law enforcement, the private sector, and public diplomacy, many of which track with the April 2023 administration strategy. These recommendations included: U.S. diplomatic pressure to make Mexico’s good (on paper) chemical control legislation have teeth; training for the Mexican military, now in charge of the ports, to take evidence into custody in a way that can lead to judicial action; and improvements to Mexico’s compliance with UN-sponsored tracking and pre-export notification systems, like “PEN Online,” which could be used to push for greater control, reporting, regulation, and possibly international scheduling, of analogues or chemicals with no proven dual use.
On the multilateral front, the study recommended the United States continue its diplomatic push to have prohibitions apply to all analogs of UN-listed chemicals, since such analogs easily evade international controls. This would place the burden of proof on the user to show that a variant of a controlled chemical is legitimate, not on the international community to identify and schedule every chemical mutation. The new U.S.-led “Global Coalition” is part of this invigorated diplomatic approach.
However, while emphasizing the importance of Mexico enhancing its drug control dialogue with China, the study considered efforts to lock down China’s chemical trade, as Secretary Blinken pressed for in his recent visit, to be far from a “silver bullet.” Licit chemicals are produced everywhere, and precursors are easily re-engineered; other nations would fill the gap if China closed its doors.
Given this sad reality, there is yet another policy option that needs to be considered—hardening North America. Mexico, the United States, and Canada—which has its own overdose problem—should create a single law enforcement zone against precursor chemicals and synthetic drugs coming from various supplier countries outside the hemisphere. (A similar effort to unify North American regulatory structures was the Western Hemisphere Travel Initiative, which built on 9/11 commission recommendations to push for Mexico and Canada to harmonize their visa restrictions with the United States.) Ideally, all U.S. borders and ports would be part of a seamless North American whole. Canadian authorities have noted that enforcement actions against fentanyl itself have led to an increase in chemical smuggling in their country; in February 2023, they netted enough precursor chemicals in a Vancouver raid to produce over 260 million doses of fentanyl—chemicals that had entered Canada from the United States.
This “Fortress North America” concept would rest on existing drug cooperation mechanisms (such as the first North American trilateral meeting on fentanyl in April 2023) and, innovatively, on North America’s free trade agreement. While it might be a bureaucratic third rail to speak of trade in the same conversation as counternarcotics, as Dr. Gupta and others have noted, 70,000 dead Americans—per year—means bureaucratic business as usual needs to end.
The “Good Regulatory Practices” concept of Chapter 28 of the United States-Mexico-Canada Agreement (USMCA) states that the three nations should take “compatible regulatory approaches among the Parties, and reduce or eliminate unnecessarily burdensome, duplicative, or divergent regulatory requirements.” This very general provision could cover fentanyl precursor and pre-precursor reporting and control—thereby requiring Mexico and Canada to adopt the strongest regulations that the United States has in this regard. For example, if Congress made permanent its scheduling of fentanyl-related substances, last extended in December 2022 for two years, that rule would have to apply to the other two nations. The North American bloc could announce coordinated actions at the annual worldwide UN Commission on Narcotic Drugs, using public diplomacy to leverage action by other regional groups.
“Fortress North America” purposefully invokes the USMCA because the private sector must be adequately motivated to be part of this solution. It is too much to ask that law enforcement shoulder this alone. Making this issue a high-profile agenda item within trade channels would signal to the private sector in all three countries the high level of political will within the United States to address the problem. Businesses producing or importing chemicals are the equivalent today of farmers in Bolivia and Peru growing coca, not truly to blame for the enormity of the problem, but numerous, complicit, and essential to a solution.
Obstacles to moving from older approaches are both rhetorical and legal. Congressional pressure to “do something” visible is intense. There is an addiction, pun intended, to some “War on Drugs” architecture of highly militarized approaches, like “Plan Colombia” and the early days of the Merida Initiative, and antipathy to looking weak by sidelining any of the old tools or concepts. For example, even after Congress mandated a bipartisan Western Hemisphere Drug Policy Commission (WHDPC) to re-think drug policy, change has been resisted. The WHDPC strongly urged discontinuing the “Majors” list—anachronistically based on cultivation acreage of plant-based crops—and the much-derided public certification process, suggesting instead a classified and private negotiations process with public denouncement only if those negotiations derailed. But Congress has kept the name-and-shame approach, which pointlessly expends diplomatic capital the United States badly needs to fight fentanyl.
Besides rhetoric, barriers to new approaches may be legal. Can trade and the private sector be linked to law enforcement? The answer should be yes, because that line has been crossed when it comes to terrorist financing and anti-money laundering policies and actions. Based on the ability to look at this problem with a new lens, bold and timely action could save lives.
Annie Pforzheimer is a senior associate (non-resident) with the Project on Prosperity and Development at the Center for Strategic and International Studies.
