Marquita Berry remembers hearing music playing softly as she walked into her son’s bedroom last October.
She found him sitting cross-legged at the end of the bed, leaning forward, with one earbud resting on his shoulder.
“I reached out to touch him, and I could tell that he was no longer….” Ms. Berry said, her voice trailing off.
It has been less than a year since fentanyl stole the life of her eldest son, James Stafford, 30, who had been going through some rough times and struggling with an addiction to pain pills.
She believes her son, a father of three, went looking for pain relief in the small town of Richburg, South Carolina, only to find death in a fentanyl-laced pill.
Death came for many of his friends as well, Ms. Berry said. Twelve died from fentanyl in 2022.
Ms. Berry was one of hundreds who gathered at the “Lost Voices of Fentanyl” event in Washington on July 13.
She and others who lost loved ones to the deadly drug demanded policy changes to save lives.
“Hey, hey, ho, ho, fentanyl has got to go,” they chanted on their march to the White House.
Ms. Berry believes China has become a merchant of death and blames the communist country for her son’s overdose, because that’s where most fentanyl comes from.
“I think China has a lot to do with this,” she said, adding that her sadness has turned to anger.
“It seems like they’re trying to kill us. I would like [lawmakers] to stop all ties with China.”
Ms. Berry believes an open border has helped cartels smuggle the deadly drug into the country via Mexico.
Many in Congress agree. In April, lawmakers passed the FEND OFF Fentanyl Act, which sanctions people and international drug trafficking organizations that are linked to trading illicit fentanyl and fentanyl precursors. But critics say more needs to be done because China and the cartels appear to be purposely targeting Americans.
(L–R) James Berry, his mother Maquita Berry, and brother Trinity Stafford, in an undated photo. (Courtesy of Lillie Allmon, Monumental Photography)
Some have called the fentanyl crisis a modern-day Opium War, which broke out in 1839 between the British and Chinese. It got its name from the British opium smuggling operation that shipped the narcotic out of Indian colonies into Chinese ports against the wishes of the Chinese government.
The Select Committee on the Chinese Communist Party (CCP), in an investigation into the CCP’s role in the fentanyl crisis, detailed evidence during an April meeting that China was using fentanyl as part of unconventional warfare against the West.
The committee pointed to Chinese general Qiao Liang publicly discussing “drug warfare that causes disasters in other countries while making huge profits” as a warfare tactic.
The investigation found that more than 97 percent of “precursors” or chemicals used in fentanyl production come from China.
Top Chinese officials and the CCP are involved in money laundering schemes from the sale of fentanyl chemicals that use cryptocurrency, according to the committee’s findings, and Mexican transnational criminal organizations have made tens of millions of dollars of cryptocurrency payments to Chinese chemical producers for fentanyl precursors.
At a hearing of the Senate Banking, Housing, and Urban Affairs Committee in 2023, Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) said cryptocurrency was fueling the fentanyl crisis because of a loophole in anti-money laundering regulation.
China promotes the production of fentanyl through government subsidies in the form of rebates for companies that produce it.
According to the select committee, China protects fentanyl-producing companies inside its borders as long as the precursors are sold outside of China.
Companies can operate inside the CCP to make fentanyl analog chemicals such as alfentanil and 3-methylfentanyl to produce fentanyl, which is a synthetic opioid, the committee found.
Their investigation revealed the CCP protects fentanyl traffickers.
Retired senior U.S. law enforcement officials told the committee they alerted their Chinese counterparts of fentanyl trafficking in China, but those concerns fell on deaf ears.
They said that instead of helping, the CCP warned the companies that U.S. law enforcement was on to them.
In early 2024, the committee reviewed seven e-commerce websites and found more than 31,000 Chinese companies selling illegal drugs, with some guaranteeing they would bypass U.S. Customs.
(Top) People stand in line to be checked by U.S. Customs and Border Protection agents at the San Ysidro Port of Entry, Calif., on Oct. 2, 2019. (Bottom Left) An officer from the U.S. Customs and Border Protection, Trade, and Cargo Division finds oxycodone pills in a parcel at John F. Kennedy International Airport’s U.S. Postal Service facility in New York on June 24, 2019. (Bottom Right) A U.S Customs and Border Protection agent weighs a package of fentanyl at the San Ysidro Port of Entry, Calif., on Oct. 2, 2019. (Sandy Huffaker/AFP via Getty Images, Johannes Eisele/AFP via Getty Images).
Fentanyl, said to be 50 to 100 times more potent than morphine, can rapidly cause respiratory failure and death.
Data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) show that in 2023, almost 75,000 people in the United States died from synthetic opioids.
During a July 12 Hudson Institute presentation on the fentanyl crisis, Raymond Donovan, former director of operations with the Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA), said CCP members are often on the executive board of Chinese chemical companies.
“We also recognize that several of the chemical companies that we investigated were actually state-owned,” said Mr. Donovan, who testified before the Select Committee on the CCP.
Mr. Donovan said China is involved in supplying fentanyl to Mexico, which then makes it into the United States and tears at the social fabric of the country while China gets rich off selling it.
“They see it as an American problem,” Mr. Donovan said.
Fentanyl is increasingly being sold in the United States and Canada through WeChat, a Chinese-controlled app, he said.
People looking to buy drugs used to do so through a person they knew or a location where they could find dealers, but that model is dying out.
“The new vehicle for distribution is social media platforms across America,” Mr. Donovan said.
Fentanyl chemicals are shipped to Mexico, where cartels often press them into counterfeit pills that are smuggled into the United States and sold.
Ammon Blair, a former Border Patrol agent now serving as a senior fellow for the Texas Public Policy Foundation, said that China and the cartels are equal partners in getting fentanyl across the U.S. southern border.
“The Mexican cartels have built a complete Silk Road,” he told The Epoch Times.
(Top) A soldier stands guard inside a clandestine chemical drugs processing laboratory discovered in Tlajomulco de Zuniga, on the outskirts of Guadalajara, Jalisco State, on Feb. 9, 2012. (Bottom) Health workers prepare to destroy packages of fake medicine seized in China, in this file photo. China protects fentanyl-producing companies inside its borders as long as the precursors are sold outside of China. (Hector Guerrero/AFP via Getty Images, STR/AFP via Getty Images)
China understands that the Mexican cartels already have a network of distribution established in cities and towns across America, Mr. Blair said. The cartels use scattershot tactics to smuggle drugs through ports of entry, by drone, tunnels, cartel “mules,” and even crop dusters.
Transnational criminal groups have taken advantage of the open border policies of the Biden administration, Mr. Blair said.
Border agents have been busy processing some 10 million illegal immigrants crossing into the United States since 2021, meaning resources along the 2,000-mile southwest border have been spread thin, allowing for more “gotaways,” he said.
Mr. Blair said drug runners use decoy tactics to get bigger caches of drugs past points of entry. The cartels orchestrate the discovery of mules carrying a small amount of drugs, which allows another drug courier carrying a bigger payload to sneak by undetected.
Drugs are flown over the southern border by drone or crop duster and dropped into fields or ranches where drug mules, who are sometimes illegal immigrants, pick up the packages for delivery, he said.
Cartel members have even been known to use a chain pulley system under the Rio Grande to deliver drugs from Mexico into Texas, he said.
A U.S. Border Patrol agent speaks to illegal immigrants in El Paso, Texas, on Dec. 20, 2022. (John Moore/Getty Images)
Killer Pills
Sandra Bagwell, who lives in the Texas border town of Mission, lost her son to fentanyl after he took a single pill manufactured to look like a pain killer.
Percocet pills purchased at a Mexican pharmacy that Sandra Bagwell found her in son’s room in Mission, Texas, in 2022. Her son, Ryan Christopher Bagwell, 19, died that April after taking one of the fentanyl-laced pills. (Courtesy of Sandra Bagwell)
In April of 2022, her son, Ryan Christopher Bagwell, and a friend walked through the port of entry from Texas into Nuevo Progresso, Mexico.
People who live along the Texas border frequently walk into Mexican border towns to shop for cheap goods. Border residents have also been in the habit of buying prescription drugs at Mexican pharmacies and seeing doctors there because it’s far less expensive than in the states.
But as cartels, crime, and drug-running increased, it has become a riskier proposition.
While in Mexico, Ms. Bagwell’s son bought what was supposed to be Percocet, a pain killer, from a pharmacy.
Since she had bought prescriptions in Mexico, Ms. Bagwell wondered if her son thought it was safe.
“He took one pill and didn’t wake up,” she told The Epoch Times.
Ms. Bagwell said authorities believe Mexican cartels now control some pharmacies in Mexico, where authentic-looking pills are sold in sealed bottles.
After getting into her son’s phone, she found Snapchat photos of pills purchased while in Mexico. Three months after his death, Ms. Bagwell found the bottle of Percocet in his room and turned it over to authorities for testing.
The counterfeit pills from Mexico contained 11 milligrams of fentanyl, five times the lethal dose, she said.
Fentanyl is considered lethal at 2 milligrams, equal to 10 to 15 grains of table salt.
Pouches of fentanyl are displayed at the Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) Northeast Regional Laboratory in New York on Oct. 8, 2019. As many as seven in 10 pills seized by the DEA contain a lethal dose of fentanyl. (Don Emmert/AFP via Getty Images)
According to the Texas Health and Human Services Department, some counterfeit pills are made to look like prescription opioids like oxycodone, such as Percocet, hydrocodone (Vicodin) and alprazolam (Xanax), or stimulants such as amphetamines (Adderall).
They are often sold on social media and e-commerce platforms, making them available to anyone with a smartphone, including teens and young adults.
As many as 7 in 10 pills seized by the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) contain a lethal dose of fentanyl.
Ms. Bagwell blames the Mexican cartels and China for the fentanyl crisis that took her son’s life.
She believes one way to save lives would be to close the border altogether, though she concedes the cartels would still find a way to smuggle in drugs.
China remains at the heart of the fentanyl crisis, she said. She didn’t want to believe it at first, but now she feels China has declared war on American families.
“It’s an attack,” she said. “Fentanyl is a weapon of mass destruction. It’s destroying families across the United States.”
Epoch Times reporter Joseph Lord contributed to this report.