What happens when chinese scale is applied to drugs. Narcos was child’s play:

Fentanyl is a smuggler’s dream. It’s compact. It’s valuable. It’s fantastic for the smugglers and it’s terrible for law enforcement. There’s no need to grow vast fields of opium poppies, which must be defended against weather, competitors and government eyes. Raw materials and equipment are cheap. Synthesis takes ~1 week and requires neither heat nor skills more sophisticated than following a recipe. And in recent years, rogue chemists have unearthed instructions for analogues that researchers discovered decades ago but never put into legitimate use. Sellers offer these variations before governments can outlaw them. Potency and purity vary: 1 dose may produce a euphoric high, while another kills immediately. Fentanyl’s astronomical profit margins have driven its rapid spread. 1 kilogram from China sells for $3800, which, when turned into tablet form, could fetch on the street up to $30m.

2021-11-06: Easily scalable synthetic drugs created a new type of drug lord:

The United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime estimates that Sam Gor’s annual revenue could be as high as $21b, the same as Citibank’s. Practically every newspaper in the West has described Tse Chi Lop as Asia’s El Chapo. The comparison could hardly be less accurate. Joaquín “El Chapo” Guzmán, the leader of Mexico’s Sinaloa Cartel, has claimed personal responsibility for 3000 murders in a drug war that took 300k lives. That is not Tse’s way. He achieved the size of Sam Gor not by murder and torture, but by industrializing his business, reducing the cost per unit, providing an excellent product at a fair price, and establishing well-maintained networks of key partnerships. There’s also the question of scale. El Chapo’s cartel was worth $3b—a fraction of Sam Gor’s value.

2023-06-19: China doesn’t seem to be in any hurry to crack down on fentanyl, arguably for geopolitical reasons.

From 2018 onwards, drug war cooperation with the United States declined in concert with the more general deterioration of US-China relations. In August 2022, cooperation ceased altogether. There have been no high-profile Chinese prosecutions since a trial in Hebei in 2019. While state media continues to boast of “an intensified fight against narcotics” and “the strictest drug control in the world,” this rigour does not apply to fentanyl. The opioid’s traffickers have come to enjoy a great sense of impunity. America’s crisis has intensified as a result, and the Party will certainly be enjoying the historical parallel.

2023-06-23: Deaths are through the roof and all this article manages to do is to paw ineffectually at prevention.

The shift to synthetics has put law enforcement at a distinct disadvantage by dramatically reducing drug prices — recent estimates suggest that fentanyl prices have fallen rapidly, by roughly 50% from 2016 to 2021. It has also made it much harder to detect and therefore interdict drugs. A great deal more law enforcement is therefore needed simply to return to the pre-synthetic level of efficacy.