The head of American diplomacy Antony Blinken on Friday urged the international community to mobilize in the fight against fentanyl, an opiate that is wreaking havoc, particularly in the United States.
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“Having saturated the US market, the transnational criminal organizations are now trying to expand their profits elsewhere,” Blinken said, opening a ministerial meeting in Washington attended by virtually more than 80 countries.
“If we don’t work together soon, other cities around the world will pay a catastrophic price,” he added, similar to what is happening in the United States.
The international coalition is to fight against the manufacture and trafficking of these synthetic drugs.
Fentanyl is a powerful opioid pain reliever whose misuse as a drug is responsible for the deaths of thousands of people in the United States each year.
According to official figures, around 110,000 people died from drug overdoses in the United States in 2022, “two-thirds” of them from synthetic opioids, a record.
Beijing is particularly targeted because, according to experts, chemical compounds necessary for the production of fentanyl continue to be exported from China to Mexico and Central America before reaching the United States.
China banned the export of fentanyl to the US in 2019.
Beijing declined an invitation to attend Friday’s ministerial meeting, angered by US sanctions on Chinese companies.
In fact, the American judiciary recently indicted four Chinese companies and eight of their employees for importing into the United States the components necessary to manufacture fentanyl.
“China firmly opposes attacking other countries or imposing unilateral sanctions on other countries in the name of drug control,” Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesman Wang said. Wenbin.
However, a senior State Department official, Todd Robinson, assured that the United States would welcome China’s eventual participation in that coalition.
For South Korean Foreign Minister Park Jin, the Covid-19 pandemic has highlighted the need for global coordination to fight epidemics, including those related to drugs.
“We were proud to have been a drug-free country for a while. However, today we are seeing a significant increase in drug use, particularly among our youth,” he said at the meeting.
The coalition, which also has to deal with another drug, Captagon, which is flooding markets in the Middle East and Gulf, will make an initial assessment of its work on the sidelines of the UN General Assembly in New York in mid-September.