The Financial Crimes Enforcement Network, a Bureau of the United States Department of the Treasury, has published a document outlining out Chinese Money Laundering works.
Understanding Chinese Money Laundering
Category: National News
The fake pill trade hasn’t gone away
The Partnership for Safe Medicines has updated their handout which explains what a pill press is and how fake pills are made.
This easy to understand handout can be used to educate people about the risks of counterfeit pills.
Partnership for Safe Medicines update on Pill Presses
The Partnership for Safe Medicines has updated their document which describes pill presses and how they enable counterfeit pills.
Trump signs bill making tough sentences for fentanyl trafficking permanent
Read the original article on the USA Today website.
Nearly 73,000 people died from overdosing synthetic opioids such as fentanyl, according to the government.
WASHINGTON – President Donald Trump signed a law that extends tougher prison sentences for fentanyl trafficking, surrounded by relatives of people who died from overdoses and lawmakers who approved the bill.
“Today we strike a righteous blow to the drug dealers, narcotic traffickers and criminal cartels,” Trump said. “We take a historic step toward justice for every family touched by the fentanyl scourge.”
The law places fentanyl on the Drug Enforcement Administration’s list of most serious drugs with no accepted medical use and a high potential for abuse. The list includes drugs such as heroin, cocaine and LSD. Fentanyl has been temporarily assigned to the Schedule 1 category since 2018. The law makes the designation permanent.
The law also makes permanent mandatory minimum penalties of five years in prison for trafficking 10 grams of fentanyl and 10 years for 100 grams.
“It doesn’t sound like much, but it’s a big deal,” Trump said.
The Department of Homeland Security seized 27,000 pounds of fentanyl and arrested 3,600 criminal suspects in 2024.
More than 105,000 people nationwide died of drug overdoses in 2023, including nearly 73,000 from synthetic opioids such as fentanyl, according to the National Institute on Drug Abuse.
The crackdown on fentanyl distribution is also at the heart of current U.S. trade disputes with China, Mexico and Canada. Trump imposed tariffs on those countries, citing the threat of cross-border fentanyl trafficking.
“We are delivering another defeat for the savage drug smugglers and criminals and the cartels,” Trump said.
Parents of several people who died after overdosing on fentanyl spoke at the event.
Anne Fundner, whose 15-year-old son Weston died of an accidental fentanyl overdose in 2022, previously spoke at the Republican National Convention in Milwaukee last year.
“It is a lifeline for families across America for keeping our families safe,” Fundner said of the legislation. “This is what we voted for, Mr. President.”
Gregory Swan, whose 24-year-old son Drew died of fentanyl poisoning, started a group known as Fentanyl Fathers, in which parents tell their story to high schools across America.
“His passing ruined, I thought, my life,” Swan said. “There’s despair and there’s hopelessness. But we’ve been able to find some repose in going out and advocating.”
Google to block promotion of pill presses on ads and shopping platforms
Read the article on the Partnership for Safe Medicines website.
On July 1, Google announced that it was updating its dangerous products and services policy to restrict the promotion of pill presses, encapsulating machines and components they use, such as dies, molds and stamps used to create or imprint pills. The change will affect the Google Ads and Google Shopping platforms starting in September 2025, with six weeks until full implementation.
The U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) announced that states and tribes proposing importation programs can use “a static baseline approach for the cost-savings analysis” instead of trying to account for changes in unpredictable markets.
Google (finally) updates their Dangerous Products or Services policy
Read the updated policy on the Google website.
New Report: U.S. drug overdose deaths rise again after hopeful decline
Read the original article on the NPR website.
For the first time in more than a year, street drug deaths appear to be rising across the U.S. according to a new report from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
The latest available data, compiled in January of this year, shows fatal overdoses over the previous 12-month period increased by roughly 1,400 deaths.
“This slight increase reflects historic data and suggests that the U.S. saw more overdose deaths in January 2025 than it did in January 2024,” the CDC said in a statement sent to NPR. “We are working on analyses to better understand geographic trends.”
The CDC data suggests roughly 82,138 deaths during the 12-month period ending in January 2025. That would be a significant increase from the December 2024 report, but it’s still far below the overdose crisis peak of 114,664 recorded in August 2023.
Still, after seventeen months of declines in fatal overdoses that stunned drug policy experts and an unprecedented 27 percent drop in drug deaths in 2024, some addiction researchers described this report as troubling.
Keith Humphreys, a researcher at Stanford University, said the new CDC data could be an early warning that drug death declines brought on by a number of factors, including the end of COVID pandemic disruptions and weaker fentanyl being sold on U.S. streets, could be fading.
“If we assume it’s not a blip, this makes it more likely that the sudden drop [in fatal overdoses] was a one-off event rather than a fundamental change in epidemic dynamics,” Humphreys said in an email.
Most overdose deaths in the U.S. are caused by fentanyl, but researchers who sample the street drug supply have warned of an increasingly dangerous mix of chemicals being sold by dealers, including cocaine and methamphetamines, as well veterinary tranquilizers such as medetomidine and xylazine.
“Overdose trends are not a one-way street, and there will be periodic local increases,” said Nabarun Dasgupta, who studies overdose trends at the University of North Carolina.
His analysis of the latest CDC data suggested “most of the country is still trending down in the right direction.”
According to Dasgupta, the “increase in predicted national numbers are driven primarily by upticks in Texas, Arizona, California and Washington.”
Continue reading “New Report: U.S. drug overdose deaths rise again after hopeful decline”Alleged attempted fentanyl drugging shuts down Southern Colorado music festival
Read the original article on the KRDO website.
LAS ANIMAS COUNTY, Colo. (KRDO) – The Apogaea festival was set to be held June 4-8, but it was cut short due to alleged non-consensual drugging involving fentanyl. On Sunday, the Apogaea Board of Directors released a statement to clarify the weekend’s events.
The festival is known as a Colorado Burning Man regional event held near Trinidad, just north of New Mexico. What was expected to be a weekend full of art and music was quickly shut down.
On Thursday afternoon, event organizers say two festival goers came to a department tent, saying they had been gifted a substance that they tested positive for fentanyl. They say a volunteer notified the Apogaea Incident Command System (ICS), which in turn alerted the County emergency coordinator. Apogaea says they never had custody of the substance and did not test it.
The next morning, on Friday, organizers say a participant noticed an undissolved gelcap in their clear water bottle. This tested positive for fentanyl via two strip tests. Organizers say that since the bottle had been on volunteer premises, there was immediate concern that somebody might be targeting the volunteers. Apogaea says they tested the gelcap again with multiple reagent tests, which resulted in confirming the presence of multiple substances.
Field test methodologies are not 100% accurate, and they can result in false positives, shared the Apogaea board. With the presence of the gelcap reagent tests and the multiple positive fentanyl results, Apogaea says their teams had a high confidence that this was a situation of non-consensual drugging.
Organizers say that as a precaution, community water in the nearby Center Camp Café and Ranger Station was dumped. The board says they updated the County and worked with the Las Animas County Sheriff’s Office (LACSO) to come to the decision to close the event.
The Sheriff’s Office tells KRDO13 it was aware of the incident, however, it was not contacted by anyone to initiate a formal investigation of the alleged incident, nor have any suspects been identified.
KRDO13 spoke with Joe Richards, the Las Animas County Emergency Manager, who was in contact with the event organizers. Richards says the incident commander contacted him initially on Thursday to make him aware that two people at the festival had tested for and found fentanyl in a substance someone had given to them.
He says that after they had another instance with someone finding a capsule in their water the next day, which tested positive for fentanyl, that’s when they became more concerned and contacted him.
Richards tells KRDO13 the incident commander said they’d like to shut the event down to prevent any further risks, and he said it’s up to you, but I support it wholeheartedly.
So he says, as a group, they came to the conclusion to shut down the event, and although some are upset, he’s grateful there were no serious injuries. Richards says the incident commanders were proactive and took the right steps to handle the incident.
Richards says with 1,400-1,500 people at the event, the possibility of someone non-consensually drugging others was highly concerning, especially with how deadly fentanyl is. He says there were multiple EMTs at the festival, along with a local fire department on scene for nearly the entire event.
Apogaea says that to their knowledge, no one was dosed or harmed physically at the event, and there were zero medical transports from the site during the event.
Why are synthetic opioids so dangerous? An ER doc explains
Read the original article on CNN.com.
The United States is facing an alarming increase in overdose deaths among young people due to synthetic opioids.
The rate of drug overdose deaths involving synthetic opioids, which include fentanyl and fentanyl analogs, increased more than 20-fold between 2013 and 2022, according to the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
Overdoses and drug poisonings are now the third leading cause of death in people under age 20, behind firearms and motor vehicle crashes.
The overdose death counts among US youth ages 15 to 24 rose from 4,652 to 6,723 between 2018 and 2022, according to a new study in the journal Pediatrics. (A slight decrease occurred between 2021 and 2022.)
The largest increase was seen in deaths involving only synthetic opioids: Since 2020, fatal overdoses involving only these substances were higher than overdoses in which multiple substances were implicated. Overdose rates were nearly 2.5 times higher among male youths compared with female youths and more than two times higher among those ages 20 to 24 compared with those ages 15 to 19.
As a parent, I wanted to know more about synthetic opioids and their uses. Why are they so dangerous, and how are overdoses treated? How can people tell if the drugs they are taking contain synthetic opioids? Crucially, what can parents and other family members do to help reduce the risk of overdose?
The article continues on CNN.com or download the article PDF below.
Chinese app sits at the center of fentanyl epidemic, NC attorney general says
Read the original article on the Charlotte Observer website.
At the center of the fentanyl crisis sits a Chinese messaging app, six attorneys general said in a letter to the encrypted platform Monday.
WeChat could face criminal charges for allowing dealers and money launderers to seamlessly funnel billions between Mexican cartels, Chinese money laundering organizations and U.S. dealers, said North Carolina Attorney General Jeff Jackson in Charlotte Monday.
Jackson and five other attorneys general in a published letter are demanding the company by June 11 describe “what steps, if any, WeChat has taken in response to (evidence) of WeChat being used to facilitate money laundering by fentanyl traffickers.”
Jackson posted the letter on his office’s website following the Charlotte news conference Monday. It also was signed by attorneys general from as far away as Colorado to as close as South Carolina.
The China-based app used by billions of people in China and nearly 20 million in the United States could face criminal charges under North Carolina’s new anti-money laundering law, public nuisance law or federal law, Jackson said.
Read the rest of the article on the Charlotte Observer website.