China willing to try and help US overcome its opioid crisis

There is enough reason to welcome the consensus President Xi Jinping and his US counterpart Donald Trump reached on the control of fentanyl in their meeting in Argentina over the weekend. But it would be totally wrong to conclude from the agreement that China is to blame for the abuse of opioids in the United States.

Fentanyl is said to be 100 times more powerful than morphine, and even 30-50 times more potent than heroin, and its abuse has become a serious social problem in the US. More than 72,000 people died of drug overdoses in the US last year, with fentanyl responsible for more than 29,000 of them, according to data from the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

On the one hand, with the increasingly widening gap between the haves and have-nots in the US, an increasing number of poor people turn to opioids, including synthetic ones, to escape the harsh reality of their lives. On the other hand, the abuse of synthetic opioids such as fentanyl has a lot to do with some US pharmaceutical companies, which manufacture and sell fentanyl-containing drugs as painkillers.