China Encourages the Fentanyl Industry w/Ben Westhoff | Joe Rogan

You know, the war on drugs stuff, it's increasingly going to be turned towards China. You know, and in fact, Trump has been meeting with the Chinese president, and all the trade war stuff, the increasing the tariffs, this is now tied into fentanyl. And so supposedly in a couple of days, this might be out by then, but there's this announcement of a new partnership. China says they're finally going to crack down on these drug labs. And we'll see if it happens. But the point is like, we can do everything we want to try to, you know, we can go to war with China over this issue. But, you know, what is our past record in this realm? Like the DEA helped kill Pablo Escobar, right? But since then, there's more cocaine coming out of Colombia than there ever was before. You know, nowadays, El Chapo was arrested, tried, that's doing nothing to stop the drugs, the cartels, the drugs coming into the US. And, and, and there's every indication that if we do get China to stop this insane, like 90% or more of the illicit fentanyl comes from China. That if we do get them to crack down on it, the industry is going to go to India. And India is already starting to see these huge busts, like there's these Mexican cartel members getting busted in India for buying fentanyl in India. Yeah, the thing is like, China and India have the two biggest chemical industries when it comes to generics, kind of low lower level chemicals and pharmaceuticals. The US has the most profitable pharmaceutical industry, because we make like the brand name drugs, things like that. But when you're talking about generics and stuff like vitamin C, acetaminophen, which is the drug in Tylenol, these are all made in China, place like India. And so they have this huge kind of brain trust of chemists, you know, people go to university, they learn how to be chemists, and then a certain amount of them get into the illicit industry, right? So Mexico doesn't have that. Mexico doesn't have its own chemical industry and a bunch of scientists who can make fentanyl, who can make these new drugs. So that makes India so susceptible to it. And the biggest problem is actually not even the fentanyl itself, it's the fentanyl precursors. And do you know what those are? Yes, the chemicals that are used to make fentanyl. Exactly. And so that was sort of the main investigation in my book, like almost like 80 pages of the book are dedicated to this one company. They're called Yuan Chong, this Chinese company that makes more fentanyl precursors than any company in the world. You know, they they're legit. And not only that, they sell them to the Mexican cartels. And they're totally sanctioned, not only sanctioned by the Chinese government, but they get tax breaks from the Chinese government. They get subsidies, they get their land subsidized, their staff training, things like that. And that was sort of the most jaw dropping revelation that I had was that the Chinese government is not only failing to crack down, but they're encouraging this industry. They're encouraging the industry. That's insane. So it's just the idea is, look, it's making a lot of money. Let's just keep making money. Yeah, it's a lot of people ask me if they think this is a blatant conspiracy to try to like inflict harm upon the US, a subversive form of warfare. And so I think it didn't start out that way. I think that these these benefits were given so that China could increase its exports, could grow its economy, particularly when it comes to chemical exports. So that's why these tax credits started. They're called value added tax rebates. And so what that means is any chemical that you use to any ingredients you use to make a chemical for exports, you can write off the cost of those of those ingredients when you export it. So basically, it's like a 16% tax rebate. And so they originally did that just to try to like improve their economy and prove their exports. But what's crazy to me now is that last year in the middle of the trade war, this was at the height of when you heard about the trade war every day, you know, Trump was raising tariffs and doing this and that. Right at the height of that, China increased the tax rebate for fentanyl from 9% to 10%. So it was almost like a seems like a thumb in the eye. Right. Like for fentanyl. It's I don't know. Yeah, it definitely seems like a big fuck you.