Trump's threat of tariffs puts a spotlight on the whack-a-mole trade in drug precursors.
President-elect Donald Trump this week cited drugs as the reason for his threat to break US tariffs on Canadian goods.
“This Tariff will remain in effect until such time as drugs, especially Fentanyl, and all illegal aliens stop this Invasion of our Country!” Trump wrote on his social network Truth Social.
Canadian politicians have rightly pointed out that Canada and the victim of the Mexican tariff have little in common when it comes to the flow of illegal drugs (or immigrants).
But it's also true that Canada's fentanyl production is booming as seizures at the border decrease — indicating that Canada has transitioned from a consumer of fentanyl and methamphetamine to a significant producer and exporter.
That domestic production depends on importing ingredients into the country. Increasingly, as the drug industry moves into synthetics and away from reliance on plants such as coca and poppies, efforts to combat drug trafficking are focused on those ingredients and precursors.
Fentanyl-related deaths are likely to increase significantly
It is possible that 2022 will be remembered as the worst fentanyl epidemic. Deaths in the US from synthetic opioid overdoses, which began to rise sharply in 2014, appear to have peaked that year and declined slightly in 2023.
Canada also posted a slight decrease in fatal drug overdoses, with about 21 deaths per day in the first three months of 2024, compared to 23 per day during the same period last year. (By comparison, about two Canadians a day die by homicide, and five die on the streets.)
But that flurry of good news can't hide the massive damage fentanyl has done to both countries.
Between 2016 and 2024, both countries will lose almost the same number of people to opioid poisoning that they lost in the Second World War – about 47,000 in Canada and about 400,000 in the US.
So it is not surprising that fentanyl has become a political issue, and whether Trump's allegations against Canada are true or not, it is clear that it is in the interests of both countries to do something about fentanyl.
The economics of local fentanyl processing
The idea of importing chemicals to make fentanyl or meth – instead of manufacturing them overseas and importing the finished product – is not hard to understand.
China is the primary source of chemicals used to make synthetic opioids. China is killing people who make illegal fentanyl.
But the same Chinese government has long been willing to ignore Chinese companies that sell chemicals that others can use to make fentanyl elsewhere in the world. That fact has led the US to punish Chinese companies and individuals that Washington accuses of profiting from trade without facing consequences at home.
After punishing eight Chinese-based chemical companies last year, the US Department of Justice said the companies had shown by their actions that they knew their products were being used for illegal purposes.
“(The eight companies) often try to evade enforcement by using re-shippers in the United States, false labels, false invoices, fraudulent mailings, and packaging that conceals the true contents of the parcels and the identity of the distributors,” the department said in a press release.
“In addition, these companies often use cryptocurrency transactions to hide their identity and the location and movement of their funds.”
Superlabs sprouts in Canada
The two biggest criminals involved in importing precursors into North America are the Sinaloa Cartel and the Jalisco Nueva Generacion Cartel (CJNG).
They use the sophisticated labs needed to convert the precursors into finished opioids and methamphetamine, generating billions of dollars in the process.
But that production is not limited to Mexico. A recent RCMP bust in Falkland, BC revealed a superlab production facility unlike any found before in Canada – capable of producing large quantities of fentanyl and meth for export (although the RCMP reported that the intended drug market was not – US. ).
It was just the latest in a series of busts by the BC RCMP chemical front.
There are also growing signs of efforts by Mexican companies to establish locations, and manufacturing facilities, in western Canada.
There is nothing new about efforts to reduce precedents. In fact, the main precursors of methamphetamine (1-phenyl-2-propanone [P2P] and methylamine) and fentanyl (4-anilino-N-phenethylpiperidine [ANPP] and norfentanyl) are almost as tightly controlled as the finished drugs themselves.
For that reason, the focus of law enforcement and regulators has shifted to less controlled “precursors”, such as 4-Piperidone which is used to produce ANPP, which in turn is used to make fentanyl.
Both Canada and Mexico have taken measures against that substance.
In June, Canada added 4-piperidone, “its salts, derivatives and analogues and salts of derivatives and analogues,” to the Controlled Drugs and Substances Act as a controlled substance.
Mexican President Claudia Sheinbaum highlighted her country's efforts to combat fentanyl in a letter to Trump in response to his threat of tariffs.
“A constitutional amendment is about to be approved by the legislative branch in my country that will declare the production, distribution and sale of fentanyl and other synthetic drugs as a serious crime with no access to bail,” he wrote. .
“However, it is public knowledge that chemical precursors enter Canada, the United States and Mexico illegally from Asian countries, which makes international cooperation very important.”
A game of whack-a-mole
But part of the problem with controlling synthetics is that there are often alternatives available – and there's always a precedent.
Calvin Chrustie spent 32 years in the RCMP, most of which was investigating various organized crimes.
“One of the issues that makes it very difficult for law enforcement, people at the border, is the flexibility and change in terms of the properties of some of these chemicals,” he told CBC News.
Sometimes, small molecular changes can be made to a banned substance that makes it legal and unregulated.
“They design them in such a way that law enforcement and others cannot catch them because they do not fit into certain programs within our legal framework,” said Chrustie.
It is not difficult to block 4-piperidone, a substance that has no significant trade beyond the production of fentanyl. But 4-piperidone itself can be made from other substances that are not strictly controlled.
And if those substances are regulated, drug manufacturers can simply reverse the production chain until they get to the pre-precursors – the substances that are used legally in the industry and therefore the most difficult to control.
At some point, the effort to stop the production of illegal drugs begins to interfere with the legal trade.
Many methods of cat surgery
Furthermore, when one precursor is banned, another is quickly available (or designed) to replace it.
Case in point: when the US meth epidemic began, most meth was synthesized at home in small labs using pseudoephedrine in cough medicine as a starting point. Meth manufacturers hire addicts, known as “smurfs,” to visit drug stores and buy large quantities of cough syrup.
The US government responded in 2005 with the Combat Methamphetamine Epidemic Act, prohibiting the sale of such drugs over the counter.
But by then, Mexican drug companies – already rich in cocaine, heroin and marijuana – were interested in the meth market and wanted to get pseudoephedrine on an industrial scale.
As governments worked to shut down the international trade around 2008, Mexican companies shifted their ephedrine smuggling routes to other countries such as Argentina.
When the ephedrine trade was effectively controlled, the cartels found they no longer needed it. They can make meth using a “P2P” method that starts with 1-phenyl-2-propanone.
In 2019, the Drug Enforcement Administration was reporting that more than 99 percent of all Mexican meth samples tested were produced using the P2P method.
In fact, there are a number of different ways to make methamphetamine, and the meth coming out of Mexico is now as pure as it's ever been – and cheaper than ever.
Follow the money
The effort to stop the international trade in drugs has not been successful even when the drugs depend on the cultivation of plants such as coca and poppy (excessively) that can be sprayed or finished by hand. Today, more land is used for coca cultivation than ever before.
But the challenge is much greater with synthetics, which do not provide a choke point where the authorities can intervene and interfere with production. Crustie said a strategy that focuses too much on drug ingredients is likely to fail.
“I think it has to be a very strategic, inclusive approach,” he said. “And that includes, yes, looking at precedents, looking at where they're coming from. I'd just say it's one factor.”
US president-elect Donald Trump is threatening a 25 percent tariff on all goods from Canada if more is not done to stop illegal border crossings. CBC's Jorge Barrera breaks down why getting off the border is harder than it sounds.
The key to dismantling the networks that import precursors and produce drugs, he said, is to identify the people and companies that do it, and the illicit money that supports it.
“Focusing on people, I think is as important as focusing on the product,” he said. “And perhaps more important than the product, I think, is its finances.
“If we just focus on the previous ones and we don't focus on those two very important points in terms of interference law, if we can't identify people because our legal framework in terms of our disclosure laws doesn't allow us to cooperate and share information. and our foreign partners, that's a problem.”
Crustie said that legitimate businesses are often involved in trading, and knowingly or unknowingly benefit from it without facing negative consequences.
“To deal with this problem without the businessmen and banks participating in the fact that businesses are used to support and finance the products, as well as the people who are part of these communication programs,” he said.
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