In the spring of 2017 I began making contact with Chinese suppliers of NPS, speaking with them over both the surface web and the Dark Web, by Skype, e-mail, and encrypted message. I started by creating a fake e-mail address, a fake name, and a fake backstory, that I was in the market for recreational drugs. The suppliers were shockingly easy to find; I encountered most of them through simple Google searches of phrases like “buy drugs in China.” Their advertisements promised anything under the sun (so long as it could be made in a lab), including fentanyl and its analogues, methamphetamine, ketamine, synthetic cannabinoids, N-bombs, and opioids I had never heard of.
Most suppliers responded to my queries quickly and spoke English proficiently. They are well-accustomed to Western drug buyers, who are the bulk of their clients. I got up well before dawn to catch them during business hours and peppered them with questions about their sales practices and manufacturing techniques. Some stopped responding when I didn’t immediately place an order. Others, however, patiently answered my questions, and I eventually whittled down my contacts to a handful of promising leads who might be willing to show me their laboratories.
This is how I met a drug chemist and lab co-owner named Dowson Li—at least, that is how he signs his correspondence. He has a LinkedIn page under the name “Dowson Shanghai,” which says he received his bachelor’s degree in pharmaceutical engineering from Jianghan University in the Chinese city of Wuhan in 2001. Under “activities” it says, in English, that he took part in a “debate match held at the first grade of University, and won the champion in the Pharmaceutical Department.” As this book went to press, his company still appeared to be operating normally.
Dowson’s company is called Chemsky, and its official website dubiously claims it specializes in medical and pharmaceutical drugs. “[Chemsky] provides fine chemicals, natural products, pharmaceutical intermediates, and APIs [Active Pharmaceutical Ingredients] for major pharmaceutical and biotech companies worldwide,” it reads, next to a picture of a goggles-clad chemist handling test tubes. It adds that the company’s international roster of clients includes Johnson &. Johnson, but that is not true, according to Andrew Wheatley, a Johnson &. Johnson spokesperson. The LinkedIn page for Dowson Li says Chemsky offers twenty thousand regular products as well as “custom synthesis from gram to kilogram tailored to our clients’ specific needs.”
In truth, Chemsky’s bread and butter is NPS: synthetic cannabinoids, synthetic cathinones, novel benzodiazepines, fentanyl precursors, and fentanyl analogues, including the very dangerous 3-methylfentanyl, which is not a legitimate medical drug and has been a horrible scourge in places like Estonia. Many of these illicit drugs are advertised on Chemsky’s official website, shchemsky.com, and others are for sale on ChemicalBook.com, a directory of chemical wholesalers.
In October 2017 I sent Chemsky an e-mail inquiring about fentanyl precursors. Dowson replied promptly and cordially, attaching a product list to the e-mail, which included a long list of NPS. We began chatting on Skype; clearly he was different from other overeager salespeople I had been talking to, no fly-by-night huckster hoping for a quick profit. A chemist with years of experience, he co-owned his lab and had been able, I surmised, to always stay one step ahead of drug laws. He had gotten it down to a science, literally. After I told him I would be coming to China, he said he would be happy to meet me.
With this promise, and the same from a few other illicit chemical industry employees, I bought a plane ticket to China. In January, 2018, I arrived in Shanghai. I was very nervous about this endeavor, considering no journalist had ever infiltrated a Chinese lab making fentanyls. I soon contacted Dowson, asking if he would be willing to take me to his company’s lab. He said perhaps, but first we could talk at his company’s office. Rather than giving me the office’s address, however, he asked me to meet him outside a Shanghai subway station, and then we would head over together. Concerned for my safety, I arrived with a translator and researcher I’d met over the internet before my trip, whom I’ll call Jada Li. I asked her to keep an eye on things. Since Dowson requested that I come alone, however, she monitored the situation incognito from twenty feet away, intending to follow behind us on foot at a distance when we went to his office. But Dowson unexpectedly arrived in a car, so that plan was abandoned.
It was pouring rain. I shook hands with Dowson and got into his Chevy. At the wheel was a beefy man who didn’t speak English; Dowson identified him only as his driver, though the man also seemed as if he could be the operation’s muscle. We drove off toward what Dowson said was his office, but actually turned out to be his apartment, a sleek flat on the top floor of a luxury high-rise in a gated community. From sixteen stories up we gazed through thick smog at ultramodern, pulsing Shanghai.
Dowson asked me to remove my shoes and gestured at three pairs of slippers that were reserved for guests. “Take the largest one,” he said. “Now sit down please. I will make you some water.”
People had cautioned me against visiting China in the winter, as hardly anyone seems to have heat, or at least most decline to use it. Even in restaurants, patrons huddle at tables in thick jackets, drinking soup and exhaling visible breath. To compensate for the discomfort, people offered me hot water everywhere I went, the way one might be offered coffee in the United States. In the chilly environs of Dowson’s apartment, I could keep my rain jacket on without looking suspicious, allowing me to record our conversation on my smartphone, which I kept zipped up in a breast pocket.
We made small talk. Dowson suggested Shanghai tourist destinations I might enjoy—including the Jing’an Buddhist Temple and the famous Nanjing Road shopping district—and even volunteered to be my tour guide when it stopped raining. As a businessman he knew how to work the angles and to appeal to a prospective customer.
“You are so, how do you say, not old!” he said, as we sat down in his home office, in front of his desktop computer. I laughed and thanked him.
“I’m not too old, too. Thirty-eight,” he went on. “I’ve owned the company for eight years. We do many chemicals, including a few of the chemicals that you asked about, such as MAF. I know it’s not legal in several countries, but it’s still legal in China.”
MAF, also known as methoxyacetylfentanyl, is the fentanyl analogue also sold by Dark Web dealer U4IA. Though it had recently become a schedule I drug in the United States (“no currently accepted medical use and a high potential for abuse”), its legal status in China made it desirable, considering regular fentanyl and many other analogues were banned. MAF wouldn’t be legal in China for long, but when the Chinese government outlawed it, Dowson would simply move on to new drugs that haven’t yet been banned.
It is a never-ending cat and mouse game, and Chemsky thrives within this narrow window of legitimacy, which often lasts less than a year for any particular substance. During the brief period when a new drug has developed positive word of mouth on the Internet and is still legal in China, chemical companies like Chemsky produce and sell as much of it as they can.
I had a few sips of hot water, and then Dowson and I got down to brass tacks.
Many American politicians have found an easy scapegoat in China, including Chris Christie, who headed the Trump administration’s 2017 opioid epidemic commission and called China’s opioid export “an act of war.” Some members of President Trump’s cabinet have been more diplomatic. “China has been an incredible partner in helping stop the production of drugs like fentanyl in China,” former Health and Human Services secretary Tom Price told the Associated Press in 2017. Trump himself has at times sounded like both sides, alternately excoriating China for not doing more to stop the crisis and pledging to work with the country diplomatically.
Liu Yuejin, deputy chief of China’s National Narcotics Control Commission, and other Chinese officials do not appreciate being blamed for the NPS crisis. Liu and others note that China has scheduled hundreds of new drugs, more than even the United Nations. In April 2019, at the request of President Trump, China said it would schedule “the entire class of fentanyl substances,” effective May 1. Though it was far from clear if this new regulation would have teeth, many experts applauded it. “For the first time, China is expressing some responsibility for America’s opioid crisis,” said Katherine Tobin, former member of the U.S.-China Economic and Security Review Commission. This blanket ban of fentanyl analogues could potentially stymie companies operating in the legal gray area. The Dark Web fentanyl dealer Desifelay1000 said that some of his Chinese contacts are “jittery” because of the action.
Still, the United States has been burned by these types of promises from China before. In 2016, for example, China appeared to promise to crack down on exports of legal-in-China/illegal-in-America drugs but failed to do so. Experts say that, beyond grand pronouncements, China should focus on common-sense enforcement of its illicit industry, prosecuting violations of existing laws and targeting fentanyls with the same force the country has targeted methamphetamines. “China can develop human intelligence to identify drug flows before they get to the port of departure,” said Vanda Felbab-Brown, senior fellow with the Brookings Institute.
Nonetheless, blaming China is a fundamental misunderstanding of the problem, insisted Liu Yuejin, of China’s drug-control agency. The United States needs to work on scaling back its citizens’ demand for these drugs. “It’s common knowledge that most [NPS] have been designed in laboratories in the United States and Europe, and their deep-processing and consumption also mostly takes place there,” Liu said at a June 2018 press conference. “The U.S. should adopt a comprehensive and balanced strategy to reduce and suppress the huge demand in the country for fentanyl and other similar drugs as soon as possible.”
Indeed, most popular NPS were developed in Western laboratories, and China scheduled many of these chemicals not because Chinese people were excessively abusing them but because of US pressure. China now finds itself in an awkward position. When Western countries ban a drug, China eventually follows. At the same time, the country doesn’t want to be told what to do.
The September 2017 US indictments of two Chinese nationals provides a good example: Jian Zhang, the Shanghai chemical manufacturer accused of manufacturing the fentanyl that killed Grand Forks teenager Bailey Henke and three other people; and Yan Xiaobing, from Wuhan, accused of operating “at least two chemical plants in China that were capable of producing ton quantities of fentanyl and fentanyl analogues,” according to the US Department of Justice. This news was announced with great fanfare, and in October 2017 US deputy attorney general Rod Rosenstein held a press conference in which he noted that the two men were the first Chinese nationals to be placed on the Consolidated Priority Organization Targets list, the Justice Department’s ranking of the world’s most prolific drug traffickers and money launderers. The indictments “mark a major milestone in our battle to stop deadly fentanyl from entering the United States,” said Rosenstein.
But China declined to hand the men over. Yu Haibin, director of precursor chemical control at China’s National Narcotics Control Commission, said that while the country’s law enforcement was investigating the men, it did “not have solid evidence to show that they have violated Chinese law.” In the meantime, he added, the United States had only “made our investigation difficult.”
The United States and China have collaborated in some instances. China’s National Narcotics Control Commission said it regularly tips off the US government “to track NPS drugs and their buyers,” and this works both ways. In September 2017, responding to a US tip that a Chinese citizen was smuggling fentanyl into the United States, Chinese police in Hebei province began investigating, leading to arrests of twenty-one people, including a Xingtai resident, Wang Fengxi, who allegedly created “a global NPS sales network” that trafficked new drugs including fentanyl to customers in the United States and other countries.
Because China’s media is state controlled, getting reliable statistics about the country’s volume of drug arrests and seizures is impossible, but China has made a number of high-profile NPS busts on its own, one of them a rogue chemistry professor named Zhang who earned comparisons to Breaking Bad’s Walter White in Chinese news reports. He first learned about NPS after a teaching stint in Australia. In 2005, Zhang—whose full name wasn’t released to the media, though he doesn’t appear to be related to Shanghai purported fentanyl dealer Jian Zhang—began making methylone, the popular ecstasy substitute. He and a partner named Yang made millions selling to Internet customers in the United Kingdom, Australia, and North America, but when the drug was scheduled in China in 2014 they appeared to have switched course. Zhang’s Wuhan factory was soon busted for producing a “zombie drug,” which appeared to have been MDMC, a Sasha Shulgin creation that is an inferior version of MDMA. The drug was already scheduled in China, and in 2017 Zhang received a life sentence, while Yang received a “suspended” death sentence, meaning that in all likelihood he will not be executed.
Wang Bo was a star chemistry student from a top high school near Wuhan, who, with his wife, founded a pharmaceutical company that employed thirty people and claimed to be performing “anti-cancer drug research.” In reality they made NPS. “Bo had luxury products like a Mercedes Benz and a Jeep, and around $500,000 savings in foreign accounts,” read a news account. In 2016 Wang was arrested for selling some fourteen hundred pounds of illicit substances, mainly to European customers. A seized package led to his downfall. Though investigators and even a chemistry PhD had a difficult time identifying his chemicals, they were eventually determined to include 3-MMC—which is similar to the stimulant mephedrone.
Hunan province resident Yao Xiao Dong was the first person convicted in China for distributing fentanyl, according to media accounts. A poorly educated man said to have committed crimes to feed his drug habit (though exactly what drug was not specified), Yao initially planned to make meth, but found fentanyl’s synthesis easier. In 2013 he began buying precursor chemicals and processing equipment and soon had a client base. He employed a group of underlings, who called him “Dong Brother” (a term of respect, based on his name), and stashed his materials at friends’ homes. After a raid, however, he and his accomplices were arrested. Yao’s 2015 trial was challenging for prosecutors, who suffered from a lack of direct evidence, but Yao was nonetheless convicted of manufacturing and trafficking, received life imprisonment, and was stripped of his personal property and voting rights. Prosecutors gave the accused “a taste of their own medicine and penetrated Yao Xiao Dong and the others’ lies, rationally and vividly exposing crimes and cracking down on their arrogance,” according to a news account.
These arrests were possible because the traffickers sold drugs that were banned in China. Many drug manufacturers there, however, abide by the letter of their country’s law. And because China has no extradition treaty with the United States, the country is under no obligation to respond to American complaints.
In such a situation, chemists like Dowson Li feel pretty comfortable.