See correction at the end of this article.

President Donald Trump this week begins an Asia trip to Japan, South Korea, China, Vietnam, and the Philippines, a major topic of which will be the risk of war with North Korea.  Will he also acknowledge that the U.S. is already in a deadly undeclared war with Communist China?

Days ago, Mr. Trump declared a "public health emergency" over the worst drug epidemic in American history.  In 2015, 92 million Americans – 38 percent of the U.S. population – were prescribed opioids.

Almost half of working-age American men who are out of the labor force use painkillers daily, and opioid use could explain 20% of men's workforce attrition, according to Princeton economics professor Alan Krueger.

In 2016, a tsunami of prescription and illegal opiates caused at least 64,000 drug overdoses – killing more Americans than died during the entire Vietnam War and more every three weeks than died in the 9-11 terrorist attacks.  Many have been casualties of China's new "Opium War."

The journal Science reports that "the United States consumes 85% of all the world's natural and synthetic opiates" and that many health professionals blame opiates for America's declining life expectancy.

While prescription opioids such as OxyContin have hooked many on opioid dependency, and have killed many who crush or otherwise try to accelerate this legal drug's 12-hour time release, something even more frightening is now happening.  As users craving heavier doses turn to the criminal black market, Chinese dealers have been supplying Fentanyl and its precursor exports to the United States, Canada, and Mexico.

Fentanyl, which users often mix with heroin or Vicodin or Percocet, is a synthetic opiate roughly 100 times more potent than morphine, reports Science.  One victim killed by Fentanyl overdose was the musician Prince.

A 2017 federal report found Fentanyl in 56 percent of opioid deaths in ten states.  Two milligrams – equivalent to a few grains of salt – of the drug can be lethal by depressing breathing.

"Underground labs in China," writes Science, "are devising potent new opiates faster than authorities can respond."  One such opioid from China is Carfentanil, 100 times stronger than Fentanyl and about 10,000 times more potent than morphine.  One website makes it available by mail, reports Science, "for $361 for 50 grams: tens of thousands of lethal doses."  Someone might suffer a fatal dose of Carfentanil merely by touching it.

For China, which officially outlaws such drugs and would execute dope-pushers selling them to its citizens, opioid exports are a win-win-win situation.  They make money for China, weaken the U.S. by drugging our people and damaging our economy, and provide revenge for the Opium Wars of the 19th century.

China's ruler Xi Jinping earlier this year invoked the "century of humiliation" caused by Great Britain forcing sales of its India-grown opium onto China.  Xi is promoting a "make China great again" nationalist agenda that blames China's past failings on opium and English-speaking imperialism.  This nationalism is calculated to redeem communists for their massacre of students in Tiananmen Square.

The United States also fed opium into China that ruined many Chinese lives.  Ships from Baltimore, as Craig R. Smith and I documented in We Have Seen The Future And It Looks Like Baltimore, played a role in selling Turkish opium to China.  Baltimore today is one of America's heroin capitals, torn by rioting over the death of a heroin dealer.  And China apparently finds it appropriate to wage this kind of chemical warfare against our children in a new "Opium War."  (China likewise helps cause America's debilitating "New Stoned Age" by promoting marijuana use.)

The anti-Trump media has used the opioid crisis to attack the president, a teetotaler who saw his own brother Fred destroyed by alcoholism.  Both the Washington Post and CBS's 60 Minutes did recent stories accusing Republicans and Trump's now resigned nominee for drug czar of passing legislation that eased some legal restrictions on OxyContin and other narcotics manufacturers.  These stories, noted the New York Times, both downplayed that Democrats "supported without dissent the same industry-friendly legislation that ... was then signed into law by [President Barack] Obama."  These anti-Trump stories were also designed to put blame for the opioid epidemic on private business, not on government failures or Communist China.

Karl Marx called religion "the opiate of the masses."  For Xi Jinping's Communist China connection, the weaponized opiates now being targeted on America are opioids.  Today's new Opium War could do more to destroy us than North Korea's arsenal of chemical, biological, and nuclear weapons.

Correction:

Dr. Ted Noel wrote:

Carfentanyl, which supposedly was "devised in China labs" in the very recent past, was actually developed in the 1974 and was used in research after that. It never entered clinical practice since it offered no clinical advantage over the other fentanyl congeners. A simple look at Wikipedia would have fixed this error.

Lowell Ponte responded:

Mea culpa. The reference to carfentanil came from the usually-reliable AAAS journal Science and its article "Underground Labs in China Are Devising Potent New Opiates Faster Than Authorities Can Respond," March 29, 2017, which I linked in my piece.

The Science article at one point describes carfentanil [the Science spelling, hence the one I used] as "an elephant tranquilizer that apparently had never been studied in humans."

The new Chinese opioids can vary by minuscule chemical changes. smaller than the change from carfentanil and Carfentanyl. We might be referring to "different" drugs here.

Because Science used this drug as a prime example of its article's title, my article did likewise -- and supplied a link to this source for those seeking additional details and qualifiers. One challenge of science writing is that expert scientists commonly use a dozen footnoted technical sources to qualify every statement they write -- and hence can always find anything that is more simplified or generalized to be deficient. I've known scientists who insisted that my Reader's Digest pieces include quadratic equations to be accurate.

Lowell Ponte is a veteran think-tank futurist and former roving science editor at Reader's Digest, as well as author or co-author of eight books.  His latest book co-authored with monetary expert Craig R. Smith, Money, Morality & The Machine, is available free and postpaid by calling (800) 630-1492.  Ponte can be contacted for interviews at radioright@aol.com.