Americans are exposing themselves to a chemical attack. This ongoing assault has killed more than 700,000 people since 2000. The weapon is illicit drug use, and Americans are killing themselves with it.

In addition to these overdose deaths, roughly 100,000 Americans have been killed in drug-related homicides. This epidemic of illegal drug use is costing the economy over $1 trillion per year and destroying the willpower of the millions of people who use these chemical weapons on themselves. Since 1 in 6 Americans under age 34 use illicit drugs on a monthly basis, America’s self-inflicted damage is going to get worse and worse.

If a foreign enemy wanted to undermine America from within, facilitating the flow of illicit drugs into the country would be an effective way to do it. The People’s Republic of China has adopted just such a strategy.

A Chemical Weapon

Drug overdose is now the leading cause of death for Americans under age 50. A third of these fatal poisonings are caused by synthetic opioids like fentanyl. In 2017, almost 30,000 people overdosed on fentanyl and fentanyl analogs. Since fentanyl is up to 50 times more powerful than heroin, it is only legally available to cancer patients with a doctor’s prescription. But huge numbers of Americans are obtaining illicit fentanyl, most of which arrives from chemical laboratories in China directly through the mail or indirectly through Mexico.

According to a United States Senate report released in January, Americans illegally purchased nearly $800 million worth of fentanyl pills directly from Chinese chemical labs over a two-year period. American customers used digital currencies like bitcoin to remain anonymous, and Chinese sellers mailed them fentanyl through the U.S. Postal Service.

Chinese labs have also partnered with Mexican cartels to smuggle fentanyl into America. Mexico’s national security commissioner told the newspaper Reforma that most fentanyl entering Mexico from China comes through the Port of Manzanillo. Once the fentanyl is unloaded at the docks, it is smuggled into the U.S. by either the long-established Sinaloa drug cartel or the up-and-coming Jalisco New Generation cartel.

The deputy director of China’s Foreign Ministry information department said in January that her nation stands “ready to work with the U.S.” to crack down on illicit drug shipments. But China has taken no meaningful action.

In November 2017, U.S. President Donald Trump asked Chinese President Xi Jinping to stop the “flood of cheap and deadly” fentanyl into America. But the deputy chief of China’s National Narcotics Control Commission said that instead of blaming China for its drug crisis, the U.S. should examine the domestic situation of the nation. Former Mexican ambassador Jorge Guajardo told the New York Times in 2015 that in all his time working for the Mexican government, “the Chinese never showed any willingness to cooperate on stemming the flow of precursors into Mexico.”

American users are demanding these drugs, and Chinese criminals are supplying them. Though the Chinese government is not sending them over itself, neither is it clamping down on the supply. Chinese leaders can plausibly deny that they have anything to do with weakening America through illicit drugs.

But if you examine recent history, you will find startling examples of the Chinese Communist Party actively pushing illicit drugs into the hands of its enemies, handing them chemical weapons to use on themselves.

China’s Drug Offensive

Chinese leaders know the devastating effect narcotics can have. The opium wars of the 1800s involved thousands of tons of opium pouring into China, which addicted millions of Chinese, devastated their economy, and contributed to their military loss against the British Empire.

In 1927, China erupted in a civil war between the Communist Party and the Nationalist Party. Communist leader Mao Zedong instructed his subordinates to grow poppies, create opium and traffic it into the non-Communist regions of China. As drugs became more readily available, people more readily used them. Opium weakened drug users, the people around them, their societies, their governments and their militaries. The Communists then conquered the area—and took draconian measures to stamp out drug use, destroying poppy fields, imprisoning millions and executing suspected traffickers.

After the Communist Party conquered mainland China in 1949, Mao actually nationalized opium production and started using narcotics as a chemical weapon to destabilize his rivals, primarily Japan and the United States.

During the 1950s and 1960s, Chinese Premier Zhou Enlai managed his nation’s narcotics operations. In 1955, he allegedly told Egyptian President Gamal Abdel Nasser that the Communists would use drugs against the morale of U.S. forces in Asia (Edward R. Slack, Opium, State and Society). Soviet statesman Mikhail Suslov said in 1964 that Zhou’s strategy was “to disarm the capitalists with the things they like to taste.”

There is scant evidence that any premier since Zhou has actively managed China’s narcotics trade, but Chinese strategy still incorporates “drug warfare” in a larger military strategy to destabilize rivals.

“Recent Chinese doctrine articulates the use of a wide spectrum of warfare against its adversaries, including the United States,” said a 2014 report from U.S. Army Special Operations Command. “The People’s Liberation Army (pla) colonels Liang and Xiangsui outline China’s vision on how China will attack the United States through a combination of military and nonmilitary actions. … These methods include trade warfare, financial warfare, ecological warfare, psychological warfare, smuggling warfare, media warfare, drug warfare, network warfare, technological warfare, fabrication warfare, resources warfare, economic aid warfare, cultural warfare and international law warfare” (Sept. 26, 2014).

By turning a blind eye, at the very least, to Chinese fentanyl traffickers, the Chinese government enjoys the benefit of waging drug warfare against the Americans and weakening them. A Chinese military attack using actual chemical weapons would risk an overwhelming military response, but using the chemical weapon of illicit drugs is a subtle siege that tears at the fragile fabric of American society by attacking not its strategic vulnerabilities but its moral ones.

America’s self-inflicted and China-facilitated fentanyl epidemic is ripping apart families, multiplying crime, crippling the economy, and destroying the minds of the next generation of Americans.

Destroying America’s Willpower

Amazingly, 1 in 10 Americans admits that he has used illicit drugs within the past month. Even many American leaders in business, culture and politics have admitted to using drugs in the past. The Chinese Communist Party and Mexican cartels are facilitating and profiting from this American self-destruction, but the blame ultimately lies with the depravities of the American people.

Drug pushers may be putting this chemical weapon into the hands of the Americans, but it is the Americans who are using it on themselves and demanding more and more “things they like to taste.”

Mexican cartels and Chinese labs would have no effect on American society if people knew and clung to God’s laws of morality and health. But the American people have rejected God and given themselves over to pleasures they know are destructive. And those who are not drug users themselves fail to eradicate, continue to tolerate, and have surrendered to the effects of this chemical weapon on society. Drug addiction, crime, gang violence and family breakdown are tearing the United States apart from within.

Some argue that the solution is to legalize and regulate drugs so that people can indulge in their addictions and get high “safely.” But those who are devoted to bringing down America know that pushing drugs into the hands of an enemy is an effective way to destroy him. Over 77 million Americans have sniffed, smoked, swallowed or injected themselves with drugs for so-called “recreational” purposes. Their drug use has not brought them freedom. It has enslaved many to a destructive habit and allowed criminal organizations to overrun large portions of the country.

Regarding those who have the wrong idea of freedom, the Apostle Peter wrote, “They promise them freedom, but they themselves are slaves of corruption; for whatever overcomes a man, to that he is enslaved” (2 Peter 2:19; Revised Standard Version).

More Americans are now dying from drug addiction each year than died during the entire 20-year Vietnam War. It is destroying the willpower of a generation. And it is leading to a prophesied time when foreign enemies will enslave this nation. Only repentance can dismantle America’s culture of escapism and turn people to God’s pure, wholesome, happy way of life.

Sidebar: A Nation Enslaved

(Excerpt from No Freedom Without Law, by Gerald Flurry)

Why do children want to take drugs and destroy their minds? The mind is the only thing that really sets us apart from animals. What is lacking in their lives that would make them want to do that to themselves? Why even take a chance on something so destructive? Because their wills are so weakened, they must have something to fill the void their parents have left—in most cases. Of course, drugs don’t truly fill that void at all—they only bring people into slavery of the worst possible kind.

Drug addiction destroys the will! Sex addiction destroys the will! The worse the addiction, the weaker the will to resist, to fight evil.

Our young people today have even lost the will to participate in the military to protect our nation’s freedom. History shows the terrible consequences of a damaged will: When a nation’s will is broken, it becomes weak and ineffective—and, oftentimes, enslaved by an enemy nation!