The Justice Department Is Now Going After Chinese Fentanyl Manufacturers - Hit & Run : Reason.com

The Justice Department Is Now Going After Chinese Fentanyl Manufacturers - Hit & Run : Reason.com:
"The Drug Enforcement Administration announced today that U.S. Attorneys in North Dakota and Mississippi have, for the first time ever, indicted two Chinese nationals for illegally exporting fentanyl and other research chemicals to the U.S.

Unsealed yesterday, the DOJ's indictments accuseXiaobing Yan and Jian Zhang of running two separate international conspiracies intended to circumvent federal bans on various schedule I drugs and their analogs. In addition to Yan and Zhang, the DOJ indicted several American citizens and two Canadian prisoners who participated in the conspiracy from behind bars.

Here's the relevant information from the unsealed Zhang indictment:

• Two suspects, Jason Berry and Daniel Ceron, worked with Zhang to arrange shipments from China to the U.S. while they were incarcerated in a medium security prison facility in Drummondville, Quebec. (Prisoners running things from the inside is not new, but participating in a global drug trafficking operation seems pretty novel to me.)
• Zhang allegedly began exporting fentanyl and fentanyl analogs to the U.S. in 2013, and the DOJ says he was able to send thousands of shipments during a three-year period.
• Drugs shipped by Zhang allegedly ended up in "North Dakota, Oregon, Florida, Georgia, North Carolina, New Jersey, California, South Carolina, Ohio, and elsewhere."
• From the DOJ press release: "Zhang ran an organization that manufactured fentanyl in at least four known labs in China and advertised and sold fentanyl to U.S. customers over the Internet. Zhang's organization would send orders of fentanyl or other illicit drugs, or pill presses, stamps, or dies used to shape fentanyl into pills, to customers in the United States through the mail or international parcel delivery services." (For more than a year now, American journalists have been pointing to Chinese websites that sold fentanyl to the U.S. with horrified shock. Looks like DOJ wasn't blind, just investigating quietly.)

Yan's case is even more interesting, as the DOJ alleges he shipped not just fentanyl, but a spectrum of synthetic drugs that are analogous to substances banned in the U.S..."
Read on!