The majority of the world's meth begins in China

Saturday, January 18, 2014 by: Rebecca Winters
Tags: China, methamphetamine, illegal drugs

(NaturalNews) In the biggest meth bust so far this year, over 180 people were recently arrested when more than three tons of crystal methamphetamine worth $230 million was seized in the Chinese village of Boshe earlier this month. The massive raid involved 3,000 officers equipped with helicopters, motorboats and drug-sniffing dogs.

Another 22 tons of raw materials were also seized from the rows of houses in Boshe, a place where a fifth of all households are reportedly involved in illegal drug operations. According to the LA Times, "Piles of waste reportedly littered the town, and residents openly stored the raw ingredients beside their homes." Those living in Boshe complained that the noxious fumes from the immense drug cooking operation had thoroughly polluted the soil in the area to the point where people could no longer get any crops to grow. Over nine tons of illegal drugs have been confiscated from that area in the last six months alone.

Although many are aware that China already holds the title of the world's largest exporter, most wouldn't even consider that to include the tons of precursor chemicals used in illegal drug manufacturing that the nation ships out every year. Thousands upon thousands of pounds of these chemicals, originating in China, are seized annually. Even though many of the drugs smuggled into the U.S. come from Mexico, when people in Mexico want to make those drugs, China supplies much of the cheap chemical components with which to do so.

In the summer of 2012 alone, Mexican authorities intercepted 900 tons of meth-making chemicals shipped from China, and U.S. Customs and Border Protection seized two shipments containing 5,700 pounds of methylamine chloride, another common meth component, worth $40 million attempting to enter the country from China at LAX airport. That same year, Belize authorities also stopped a single shipment of meth from China worth an estimated $10 billion. The South China Morning Post just reported that the Hong Kong triads - China's mafia-style organized crime syndicate - are also the major suppliers of Mexico's infamous Sinaloa cartel.

Meth is bad enough, but Chinese meth?

Meth is a psychostimulant perhaps most well-known for its horrifying side effects. It's made from some really nasty stuff. Common household chemicals used to produce meth include toxic, carcinogenic agents such as methanol, benzene, methylene chloride, toluene and ammonia among others, and even more deadly vapors are created as a result of cooking meth. The subsequent chemical concoction wreaks permanent havoc on the user's central nervous system; with continual use, the rest of the body begins to fall apart, leading to the kind of decay seen with "meth mouth," where an addict's teeth literally rot out of his or her head.

Meth is big business in China; confiscations of meth pills have gone up 1500% across the nation in just the four-year period from 2008 to 2012. When the staple ingredients are considered, it is estimated that 80 percent of the meth consumed in North America actually originates in China.

China also holds the title of world's largest polluter. The country produces more pollution than any other country on the planet and is home to over 450 government-admitted "cancer villages" nestled around its power, chemical and pharmaceutical plants where residents fall pray to well-above-average levels of disease and death.

As Natural News has extensively reported before, food safety in China is also rather... lacking. Just recently, a Chinese Wal-Mart got in trouble for selling donkey meat found to be mixed with "the DNA of other animals" including fox meat. The country has been host to numerous food scandals over the years, such as with tainted killer milk, glow-in-the-dark pork, cadmium-laden rice and scavenged gutter oil being used to cook one out of every ten meals in the country's restaurants.

Not that high standards are really the most important factor considered by most drug addicts, but if the food quality and safety is lacking in China, can you imagine how much worse its chemical-laden methamphetamine must be?

Even the legal drugs in China are completely underregulated. When Chinese chemical companies - businesses that normally create products such as fertilizers, pesticides and industrial solvents - begin making pharmaceutical components, they fall out of the jurisdiction of the Chinese State Food and Drug Administration and into an untouchable, gray loophole area. Thus, pharmaceutical ingredients manufactured by China's 80,000 chemical companies are not really inspected or certified for pharmaceutical use. The New York Times reported that "the United States Food and Drug Administration does not know how many sell ingredients used in drugs consumed by Americans."

Sources for this article include:

http://worldnews.nbcnews.com

http://motherboard.vice.com

http://www.nytimes.com

http://www.scmp.com

http://www.latimes.com