The Trump administration wants private-sector companies, such as biopharmaceutical manufacturers, financial institutions, social media platforms, communication organizations and express carriers, to help law enforcement stop illicit sales of fentanyl in the U.S. and has issued a series of advisories on how to identify drug traffickers.
Fentanyl is a manmade drug that is 50 times more potent than heroin and 100 times more powerful than morphine, according to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Overdose deaths attributed to fentanyl sold illegally in the U.S. have soared in recent years.
About 36,000 Americans died of overdoses involving fentanyl from 2011 to 2016, the CDC reported in March.
Fentanyl traffickers have been increasingly infiltrating legitimate business pathways to get their illicit products into the U.S., Trump administration officials told reporters during an Aug. 21 briefing.
White House Counselor Kellyanne Conway Source: Associated Press |
The U.S. Treasury Department's Office of Foreign Assets Control disclosed that it had brought sanctions against three Chinese nationals who were marketing their illegal products online and using commercial carriers to smuggle the drugs into the U.S.
Those Chinese "kingpins" were running an international drug trafficking operation, manufacturing and selling lethal narcotics that directly contributed to the U.S. opioid crisis, Sigal Mandelker, under-secretary for terrorism and financial intelligence at Treasury, said in a statement.
People peddling illicit fentanyl have become sophisticated in leveraging otherwise honest elements of the U.S. markets against Americans, White House Counselor Kellyanne Conway told reporters.
"They are tapping into our manufacturing supply chains, using the same factories that produce licit chemicals and pharmaceuticals to generate illicit fentanyl," Conway said. "They are using our own social media and commerce sites to push their poison."
The illegal activities by the fentanyl traffickers are "hijacking and distorting otherwise legal channels used by Americans and American product manufacturers in our day-to-day lives," she added.
Private-sector business platforms are vulnerable and are being exploited, said Jim Carroll, director of the White House Office of National Drug Control Policy. That is why American businesses should be critical partners in the fight against fentanyl trafficking, Carroll said.
He said the vast majority of the illicit fentanyl sold in the U.S. is made in China.
"China is becoming the drug dealer of the United States and I think that is a reputation they do not want," a senior administration official told reporters.
Advisories
The four advisories the White House and Treasury Department issued on Aug. 21 are intended to help the American business community prevent their supply chains from being exploited by fentanyl traffickers, officials said. The advisories outline ways to identify red flags and other indicators of complex manufacturing, marketing, movement and money schemes used by traffickers, they said.
The manufacturing advisory is intended to provide companies information about how to identify the various stages of making and distributing illicit fentanyl and how to refer such activities to law enforcement agencies.
It highlights typologies and red flags associated with international or domestic clandestine laboratory synthesis, including lab equipment, fentanyl precursor chemicals, pill presses and tableting or encapsulating machines and binding agents.
The marketing advisory discusses how people selling illicit fentanyl use social media platforms, e-commerce websites, mobile applications and online forums on the publicly accessible internet — also called the clearnet — to reach their customers.
Some sellers of illegal fentanyl use marketplaces set up on the so-called darknet — online networks that are intentionally restricted and used primarily for illegal activities.
But drug traffickers have found that they can reach a broader customer base by marketing on the clearnet using certain hashtags or code words, according to the Treasury Department.
The movement advisory highlights some warning signs that organizations in the mail, carrier or shipping industries should watch out for, such as incomplete shipping documentation or cargo descriptions, invalid addresses, unknown cargo descriptions and parcels sent through multiple freight forwarders.
The financial sector should be particularly aware of tactics and typologies used by illicit fentanyl traffickers to smuggle the proceeds of their sales in and out of the U.S., including using digital currency and foreign bank accounts in money laundering schemes, officials said.
Some of the predominant funding mechanisms associated with fentanyl trafficking patterns that financial institutions should take note of include purchases from a foreign source of supply using money services businesses, bank transfers, online payment processors or convertible virtual currency, such as bitcoin, bitcoin cash, ethereum or monero, the Treasury Department said in its money advisory.

