A Chinese state-run prison owned a chemical company that exported fentanyl precursors to America — while China executes its own drug dealers

Fentanyl, Prison Labor, and the Double Standard That Cost American Lives

For years, the narrative around the fentanyl crisis split neatly into two camps: either it was a failure of American doctors and pharmaceutical companies, or it was a problem of street-level drug traffickers. Few wanted to consider a third possibility: that a foreign government was actively profiting from America's addiction epidemic while executing its own citizens for the same crime.

A former federal prosecutor summarized the absurdity bluntly: "The Chinese government pays you to send drugs to America but executes you for selling them in China." This wasn't opinion. It was an observation grounded in documented government policy and corporate ownership records that had been hiding in plain sight.

The claim that China's state apparatus was complicit in the fentanyl crisis wasn't new. Families of overdose victims, desperate for someone to blame, had pointed fingers eastward for years. Law enforcement agencies documented the pipeline. But the mainstream response was dismissive. Critics called it scapegoating. Others argued it was oversimplified—surely the real problem was supply and demand, American addiction, the medical establishment's role in creating dependency. China's involvement was real but peripheral, the reasoning went.

Then ProPublica did the reporting no one else had done systematically.

Investigators discovered that a chemical company called Yafeng Chemical, located in Shijiazhuang, had been supplying fentanyl precursors to American buyers for eight years. The company wasn't some anonymous private enterprise. It was owned and operated by a state-run prison. For nearly a decade, a government facility held prisoners—likely as forced labor—while the facility itself manufactured and exported the raw materials that would eventually kill over 100,000 Americans annually.