3 Grains of Death The New Opium Wars

We are all aware daily of our ongoing “conflict” with our new chief “adversary” in the world, the Chinese Communist Party. Warnings about the need to increase defense spending to prepare for possible war with the CCP triggered by their attempt to take Taiwan by armed force, and/or exclude others from their expanded sea territories in the Spratly islands, etc., are frequent. Some of our Technocratic Totalitarians even tell us truly of the CCP’s concept and policy of “Total War”. This means that all CCP policies and actions, regardless of the venue, are geared to successfully supplanting U.S. military hegemony and economic-cultural superiority.

Thus we should not be surprised by the expanding story of CCP’s role in developing a new dangerous virus. We might be shocked to learn that this was done largely at the behest of and with monies and expertise from our own government and corporations. That was opportunistic, not criminal. One aspect of the Covid crisis originating under the CCP is, in my medical professional view, an international crime. Their gain of function research in Corona viruses may have been innocent in intent, i.e. looking for reasons and means to develop effective new vaccines (requires maximum gullibility). The escape of the virus into the community via infections in their own scientists may have been accidental due to sloppy practices (of which our allied institutions were fully aware). The spread of the virus into a worldwide pandemic was neither innocent nor accidental. Their actions within their own country were immediate and massive. Complete community and regional shutdown without ability to travel beyond one’s own doorstep, much less to the rest of the nation was instantaneous as expected in a state with complete social control over its own population. As the infection spread, complete suppression of it and any information about the virus was mandated. But the CCP continued to allow international travel from Wuhan, effectively assuring a worldwide pandemic. Can anyone truly believe this was an oversight, a blindness to foreseeable consequences? The WHO, thanks to its soto voce control by the CCP, apparently believes so. No international venues not controlled by or heavily influenced by the CCP exist to charge that government with at least criminal negligence if not outright biological warfare against the world.

This was only an indirect assault on the western world; note how little Southwest Asia and Africa were affected, as well as the pandemic’s modest effects, comparatively, on South America. Not due to some grand genetic engineering to affect only certain peoples, rather perhaps incidental to the wide availability in most of the developing world of two inexpensive safe drugs rapidly found empirically to have ameliorating or prophylactic properties regarding Covid infection. Ivermectin and hydroxychloroquine largely saved all the Belt and Road Initiative economic partners of the CCP from the ravages the West inflicted upon itself in the name of pharmacologic profits (a portion of which went to the U.S. scientific perpetrators of the virus via patents and royalties for vaccines and remdesivir). The pandemic, whether accidental or incidental, has been an ongoing distraction from the real assault directed primarily on the U.S.A. The CCP has the memory of a 5,000 year-long civilization, and very patient expectations of results from multi-generational plans. They have successfully unleashed something much more controlled and controllable, a biochemical war on the West, and the U.S.A. in particular, perhaps to satisfy both future aspirations and cold revenge for the past. They are conducting a very successful war of attrition, a new “Opium War”.

According to one dense history, the Chinese view the 19th century as “the century of humiliation”. Twice, in 1839 and again in 1856, Britain and eventually France attacked China in wars of the most vicious mercantilism, forcing China to allow unrestricted importations and selling of opium to its citizens by British and later American merchants. In the first Opium War the British East India Company marketed opium they grew in India to British who sold it on to Chinese smugglers for the newly acquired habit of smoking it recreationally. A pleasant habit soon became a widespread disabling epidemic of addiction. American merchants joined the trade with opium they imported from Turkey. Over 300,000 kg. of opium per year exploded after the East India Company’s monopoly on trade with China ended, reaching 2.3 million kg. and above after 1834. Despite desperate appeals to Queen Victoria and the British public by the Chinese Empire, no action threatened the merchants’ income or government revenues. This was, after all, “The Old China Trade” and considered a perfectly legitimate economic and biologic abuse of a “backward” people.

One local Chinese governor tried to seize the opium stored in a port forcibly opened to European trade, but only a token amount was proffered. The United Kingdom responded with military action, recovering monetary damages for the British smugglers/traders and obtaining guarantees of future unrestricted opium selling, as well as other trade concessions and the opening of more Chinese ports to European trade to both Britain and France.

In 1856 despite ongoing internal revolution the Chinese again tried to free themselves from Opium slavery by the West. An official in Canton seized a British ship and crew, and British commercial properties were burned. A French missionary was executed. Four years of smoldering coastal warfare with Britain and France, including the invasion of Beijing, led to a complete subjugation of Chinese trade sovereignty to Britain, France, and the rest of the industrializing West, with further punitive monetary reparations and expansion of control of coastal trading ports by the Europeans. The pharmacological poisoning of China continued for generations until the Communist Chinese Revolution and Mao’s Cultural Revolution threw off the narcotic yoke in favor of that of total domestic fascistic control.

Do those fascistic controllers, enculturated in terms of centuries of historical experience and future planning, forget such? Do they put aside memories of forced biochemical subjugation to savor, vampire-like, just the economic blood of the West through state-controlled kidnapping of production technologies and assets?

No,

they have repeatedly and openly stated that their competition with the West, and America in particular, is “Total War”, on all fronts. Economic, social, cultural, political,scientific, and military. The CCP means war when they state they are at war. We, to our detriment, recognize only armed conflict or federal domestic spending programs as war. Their methods are all encompassing, and in a most critical area, almost ignored.

That most critical area, recognized but minimized as to its origins and intent, is a biologic war of attrition with Fentanyl. The CCP has returned the Opium Wars to us, a mirror of “The Old China Trade”. Britain, America, and France conducted the initial Opium Wars to defend immoral economic activity. The U.S.A. struggled through the 1980’s and the 1990’s with a snowstorm of cocaine produced in South America and Mexico. That was and is a criminal and economic enterprise. The CCP’s new Opium War with Fentanyl is a strictly political enterprise designed to enable and enhance our societal addictive suicide, with economic side benefits to its criminal co-conspirators.

Fentanyl is a perfect bioweapon—it kills quickly, broadly, and unexpectedly (to its victims), and those it doesn’t kill soon are enslaved to it. A synthetic opioid narcotic easily manufactured from cheap ingredients and not scientifically traceable to its source, as are plant-based drugs. Its production is not dependent on weather, diseases or pests, water, vast tracts of land, or large numbers of’ cultivators and processors. Odorless, tasteless (a taste may mean certain death), it mixes easily with other illicit drugs thereby boosting their narcotizing effect and addictive power in an uncontrollable fashion. Medically, it is 50 X stronger than heroin and 100 X stronger than morphine. The CDC finds it only 25 X stronger for purposes of their online advice to users. You may be reassured to know that our CDC also cautions that “you should test your drugs with Fentanyl test strips…(which are) inexpensive and typically give results within 5 minutes. (the test strips) might not detect more potent Fentanyl-like drugs, like carfentanil.” The CDC even provides a fact sheet on what test strips are, how to use them, where to obtain them. Perfection as a biological weapon to disable and destroy our youth rests in the lack of controlled dosing, not knowing an illicit drug source contains Fentanyl, and that a fatal dose is as little as 3 grains of salt.

But those 3 grains of death can be readily reversed by widely available Naloxone, right? Wrong.

The increased risks of death from CCP Fentanyl is due to not only increased potency and unknowable dose, but also to its faster onset of action and lower cross-tolerance for those already using other opioid narcotics. A published study in mice found a more rapid and greater depression of respiration than equivalent doses of heroin and its derivative, morphine. That study also found that naloxone was less effective at reversing respiratory depression with Fentanyl than that with morphine,, and though prolonged use of morphine was associated with increased tolerance of the depression of breathing, chronic use of Fentanyl showed less of that tolerance.

Death may come very rapidly and irreversibly with Fentanyl. A little known effect, “Wooden Chest Syndrome”, occurs due to the drug’s actions on other parts of the nervous system than the opioid centers in the brain. The dose-response range for this effect is very narrow, and it is almost uniformly fatal without immediate expert airway management.

Domestic defense against Fentanyl concentrates on a consumer’s individual demand and opportunity, not on the ultimate producer’s motives and means. Again Fentanyl is a perfect bioweapon. No one intentionally buys illicit Fentanyl for consumption; its extraordinary potency in tiny amounts is well known and unsuitable from a practical point of view for individual possession and use. How do you measure out just “one or two grains of salt”? Unlike Chinese opium smokers, Fentanyl victims obtain it unknowingly through buying heroin expanded with Fentanyl or counterfeit pharmacologic opioids laced with Fentanyl. Producers and dealers, in Latin America and domestically, add these cheap expanders to enhance effects and improve addictive powers, thus creating more loyal customers for their products. Fentanyl or its precursors are cheaper to the producer than heroin. It is counterproductive to their economic model to kill off their customer base. But they cannot adequately control the amounts or distribution of Fentanyl in their “home baked” products. As a result, with counterfeit pills represented on street or on line as narcotics, sedatives, or many other classes, “one pill can (and does) kill”. Even part of a pill can be fatal, due to the chocolate chip phenomenon of unequal distribution of Fentanyl in the fake pill.

Given all these horrifying features, and the fact that demand, the market for drug use, is a social disease rather than the popularly accepted alternative lifestyle choice portrayed by so many, how are we doing in our homeland warfare against this domestic drug terrorism?

So far we have limited our forces to education, apprehension, and interdiction. As noted the CDC seeks to educate the public on the “safe” use of illegal opioid drugs, providing information on how to avoid or detect Fentanyl and use naloxone (perhaps ineffectively as noted above) for inadvertent demi-fatal events. The DEA, our federal drug police, has always dealt with the largest and most serious drug crimes and criminals, and was ramped up decades ago to deal with the Cocaine epidemic. Indeed,from their website we note that their highest numbers of arrests occurred in 1999. Strangely, as the death rate from opioids and especially from Fentanyl (last year alone killing 100,000) that arrest rate has declined, with the figures for 2022 just over 26,000 domestic arrests. Distribution, use, addiction, and death geometrically expand and arrests decline. Federal arrests have not been replaced by those of local law enforcement. The reasons seem enigmatic, beyond mere tolerance of the drug lifestyle and seeking “more equitable” justice for drug criminals. Interdiction by Customs and Border Patrol, overwhelmed with the volume and geographic scope of illegal immigration, have had little effect at legitimate border checkpoints., In 2023 drug seizures were almost 5,000 for marijuana, almost 2,000 for cocaine, only 8 for heroin, over 5,000 for methamphetamines (Walter White still lives), and just under 1,000 for Fentanyl. Since total drug interdictions within the U.S.A. are much higher, we could presume that these seizures are the work of individuals and amateurs.

A recent newspaper article by Katie Spence  illustrates the larger picture. She notes Customs Border Patrol seized 1000 kg of Fentanyl representing fatal dosage of many hundreds of thousands,if not millions, of Americans, in June, 2023 alone. This was 5 X that seized in 2020. The DEA seized almost 6,000 kg of Fentanyl powder in 2023 along with 58 million pills containing Fentanyl. This represented a fatal dose to every man, woman, youth, and child living in the U.S.A.. Authorities expect >100,000 deaths from Fentanyl overdose this year—and many are not detected as not all drug related death inquiries test for Fentanyl. The DEA reports (not the CDC?) that Fentanyl is now the leading cause of death in the U.S.A. for anyone under the age of 50. But remember, “don’t drink and drive, buckle your seat belts, stop smoking, and get your yearly Covid vaccination”.

Spence goes on to report what our weakest initial governmental response to the CCP’s drug war of attrition on our current future might be. She quotes Professor Donna Nelson of the University of Oklahoma, an expert in addictive drug manufacture and marketing. Professor Nelson notes that the CCP’s trade and shipping of precursors is such that “Every month that’s enough to kill every person in the United States.” Given this, Professor Nelson states the obvious—that Fentanyl should be labelled “a weapon of mass destruction”. Congressional Representative Neal Dunn (R-Fla) has introduced a resolution to the House Subcommittee on Health to declare Fentanyl a weapon of mass destruction. This might be a baby step towards international action, but mainly would affect U.S. foreign policy in ways that the current administration would find unacceptable. Even so, in the spirit of Realpolitik, more aggressive measures are needed if we are to force the CCP to withdraw their deadly biochemical invasion.

Direct action against this kind of warfare must of necessity be more confrontational. We cannot merely use napalm (now outlawed internationally) against cocaine fields in Latin America or poppy fields in Afghanistan. Nor can we “buy off” the international illegal opium trade by purchasing Afghanistan’s yearly crop. That could have been a reasonable alternative to armed hostilities after Bin Laden had been assassinated, and certainly cheaper than a decade of warfare and distal interdiction of the opium crop. And possibly cheaper and more effective than our other aide funds spent there, since it would merely feed into their established culture and accepted corruption rather than trying to transmute a colonially constructed country to a Western-style democracy. These type of measures do not work against a substance produced industrially, not agriculturally. Fentanyl and especially its precursors can be sourced in multiple locales. But it must be shipped to a bottleneck of drug labs just beyond our porous borders. We have precedents for taking more definitive action in both areas.

Quarantine and blockade on the high seas has been a diplomatic tool by many nations for many reasons for many centuries. The U.S. used this measure domestically and successfully in the Cuban Missile Crisis. We continue to use it against weapons shipments, oil shipments, and shipments of possible military technology in the Persian Gulf and along the east coast of Africa. We have engaged in an internationally agreed-upon program of stopping ships from Ukraine to assure that only food was being sent. The U.S.A. can and should immediately embargo all shipments of Fentanyl and its precursors. Since all shipping from China to Mexico and South America can be identified and tracked, our Coast Guard and Navy can begin interceptions to confirm their cargo manifests and their actual cargos, confiscating any precursor chemicals and apprehending any crews caught actually transporting Fentanyl. The key to the embargo is the source port and destination port of any shipping. That sent through international mail is already detected fairly successfully by the USPS and Customs and Border Patrol but the embargo would have to be based in our ports, as well, resulting in long delays in the distribution of containers sent from China until their cargo is thoroughly inspected, not spot-checked.

These measures would be met with great indignation internationally. Presumably the CCP navy, as presently constituted, might try to intervene. Their present inequity to our navy is precisely why this embargo must begin now, before their massive program in naval buildup reaches parity. Embargoing container cargoes once arrived would provoke economic outrage from U.S. marketers of CCP Chinese products, but functions as a kind of “time tariff” that might enhance return of production to U.S. shores and a weakening of the highly dependent CCP economy. But these seemingly drastic measures are only part of our political class’s unpalatable pie.

The U.S.A. engaged in armed hostilities with Mexico in the past over criminal activity crossing our borders. We may have to do so again. Strenuous concerted efforts should begin to seal our southern border, using military troops if needed, recognizing that a Weapon of Mass Destruction is routinely coming across undetected. Fentanyl smuggling is just as dangerous as that of nerve gas, biological warfare agents, radioactive materials, or actual nuclear devices. Yet we do not currently protect our country from any of these, nor from the terrorists or foreign agents who may choose to use them. All of our technologic intelligence abilities can be focused on identifying the locales of fentanyl labs in Mexico and further south as needed. If we cannot diplomatically cooperate with the government of Mexico in rapidly and repeatedly destroying these facilities, either due to Mexico’s national hubris or corruption, then cross-border trade may have to be at risk, as well as the billions of dollars in remittances sent by those within our borders to their families in Mexico. We may have to use precision weaponry on these facilities without prior notification of the Mexican government. Much as we have “threatened” to do in Afghanistan. In the absence of direct armed conflict, the CCP’s campaign of Fentanyl infestation is nothing less than international terrorism, and must be dealt with accordingly.

These draconian efforts may have salutary side effects in addition to unforeseen consequences. International drug trade in other substances would also be affected. The influx of that admittedly small percentage of the “irregular immigrant” population (let us border on political correctness) composed of criminals, drug and sex traffickers, terrorists, and foreign intelligence agents would be diminished. Any “trade war” with the CCP and/or Mexico or other countries might be to our longer term advantage in returning productive capacity to America and our unsustainable balance of trade. Those who might choose to be our adversaries may again be given pause. The CCP, like the USSR before it, only responds meaningfully to a well-defined show of actual force ready and able to be used by a willing administration. In the arena of international biologic warfare, diplomacy and “engagement” merely invites the slouching Beast to devour us slowly.

P.S. Carfentanil, a derivative, is beginning to show up in some drug seizures and is 10,000 times more potent than morphine. Better Dying Through Chemistry
 

© Nik Bednarski, M.D. 2023