BREAKING NEWS: The number of opioid deaths in the US and Canada fell dramatically as the Chinese government took action to make life difficult for international drug labs, scientists discovered.
Deaths were rising to huge numbers before “the trend began to sharply reverse in mid-2023, dropping the annual rate of fentanyl overdose deaths by over a third by the end of 2024”, researchers said. (In the US alone, 76,000 died in 2023, which is 200 fatal overdoses a day.)
The report was published on Thursday (8 January 2026) in Science, an academic publication.
It was known that numbers of deaths had fallen, but the reason was a mystery. Sudden changes were “possibly tied to Chinese government actions”, said the report, jointly written by scientists from Maryland, Stanford, Pittsburgh and other areas (paywall link supplied). There were no other dramatic changes at that time which could be credited with causing the steep drop.
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DIFFICULT TO INVESTIGATE
The scientists said that hard data on the illicit drug trade was difficult to obtain, since the trade was illegal by definition. But the sudden drop in the number of deaths had to be investigated, as it was “of major scientific and policy interest”. The researchers said: “Whether a supply shock could account for a substantial part of the decline is challenging to determine because drug trafficking organizations operate in secret.”
To get past the secrecy problem, the scientists collected medical data from US and Canadian governments (such as hospitalization figures) and monitored relevant discussions on the social media platform Reddit. They then matched the timing of the fall to actions taken by various parties trying to fix the problem.
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TOUGH LAWS
It’s a story with twists and turns. Opioids were being widely pushed, legally, in US clinics from 1995, and soon became a major problem. The US has just 4.25% of the world’s population but was eventually consuming 80% of the planet’s supply of opioids.
This was then compounded by illicit opioids. By the late 2010s, some of sellers of illicit opioids were traced to China—and the US asked Beijing to take action against them.
The Chinese did so. In 2019, the Chinese government became a global leader in passing tough rules against the illegal fentanyl trade, and the sale of key precursor chemicals, with harsher laws and penalties than anywhere else, including the US. In China, involvement in the trade was punishable by life in prison or the death penalty.
The Chinese introduced real name registration for senders and receivers of medical goods. They brought in a process of examining and x-raying parcels, and stepped up examination of the cross-border package trade to the US.
The China crackdown was a success. By September 2019, illicit movement of fentanyl related substances from China seized by the US dropped to zero. The US expressed appreciation to Beijing and noted drug control as a highlight in bilateral cross-country law enforcement cooperation.
China and the US even held a joint press conference.
But as China killed the illicit trade at home, cartels in Mexico and elsewhere ramped up their production, so the overall number of deaths in the US continued to climb.
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TWIST IN THE TALE
Then came a strange twist. In 2020, the US under President Joe Biden passed a bizarre and unprecedented law that said all goods and services from northwestern China would be automatically classified as “produced by forced labor”. This had the unfortunate effect of making it impossible for US drug investigators to continue working with China’s counterparts, since their office was in western China.
As the US problem worsened from 2020 to 2023, China eventually took further action—at no small cost to itself. It put restrictions across a much wider range of entirely legal chemicals it produced, to make it significantly harder to produce anything close to an opioid drug anywhere.
The timing suggests that this action by the Chinese government triggered a supply shock to the traffickers in the Americas by the middle of 2023. That period saw the start of a sharp drop in the number of deaths in the US and Canada.
By the end of 2024, the death rate in the US had dropped by a third.
MISREPORTING
One of the big problems in the fight against fentanyl and other drugs is the misreporting that goes on. The Chinese government tends to be painted (by the western press and by AI answer-bots) as the source of the problem, when even the US Drugs Enforcement Administration says the relationship has been characterized as co-operative and successful.
There are also a historical factor and an ethnic factor for the bias – at one stage, fentanyl or restricted precursors were coming from China, before the crackdown in 2019. And one of the drug cartels specializing in opioids in Mexico is run by a man of Chinese heritage.
Meanwhile, the new study suggests that periods when the US has co-operated with China are times which can have measurable positive results—as the dramatic fall in numbers of overdose deaths show.