(Washington) The head of American diplomacy Antony Blinken on Friday called on the international community to mobilize to fight against fentanyl, an opiate which is wreaking havoc especially in the United States.
“Having saturated the US market, transnational criminal organizations are now looking to expand their profits elsewhere,” Blinken said as he opened a ministerial meeting in Washington bringing together, virtually, more than 80 countries.
“If we don’t act together soon, other cities around the world will pay a catastrophic price,” similar to what is happening in the United States, he added.
PHOTO KENO GEORGE, AGENCE FRANCE-PRESSE
US Secretary of State Antony Blinken
The international coalition is supposed to fight against the manufacture and illicit trafficking of these synthetic drugs.
Fentanyl is a powerful opioid painkiller, whose misuse as a drug is responsible for the deaths of thousands of people in the United States every year.
According to official data, some 110,000 people died of overdoses in 2022 in the United States, “two-thirds” of them due to synthetic opioids, a record.
Beijing is particularly in the sights because, according to experts, chemical compounds necessary for the manufacture of fentanyl continue to be exported from China to Mexico and Central America, before entering the territory of the United States.
China banned fentanyl exports to the United States in 2019.
Beijing declined an invitation to attend Friday’s ministerial meeting, angered by US sanctions targeting Chinese companies.
American justice has in fact recently indicted four Chinese companies and eight of their employees for having brought into the United States the components necessary for the manufacture of fentanyl.
China “firmly opposes attacks targeting other countries or the imposition of unilateral sanctions against other countries in the name of drug control”, Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesman Wang said. Wenbin.
A senior State Department official, Todd Robinson, however, assured that the United States would welcome China’s further participation in this coalition.
For South Korean Foreign Minister Park Jin, the COVID-19 pandemic has shown the need for global coordination to fight epidemics, including drug-related ones.
“We were proud to be a drug-free country for a while. Yet today we are seeing a significant increase in drug use especially among our youth,” he said at the meeting.
The coalition, which must also look into another drug, captagon, which is flooding the markets of the Middle East and the Gulf, will make an initial assessment of its work on the sidelines of the UN General Assembly in mid-September. At New York.