Guess which Chinese city was epicenter of chemical supplies for fentanyl manufacture

The plot continues to thicken:

... Though some clandestine labs that make fentanyl from scratch have popped up sporadically in Mexico, cartels are still very much reliant upon Chinese companies to get the precursor drugs.

Huge amounts of these mail-order components can be traced to a single, state-subsidized company in Wuhan that shut down after the outbreak earlier this year, said Louise Shelley, director of the Terrorism, Transnational Crime and Corruption Center at George Mason University, which monitors Chinese websites selling fentanyl.

“The quarantine of Wuhan and all the chaos there definitely affected the fentanyl trade, particularly between China and Mexico,” said Ben Westhoff, author of "Fentanyl, Inc."

“The main reason China has been the main supplier is the main reason China is the supplier of everything — it does it so cheaply,” Westhoff said.

“There was really no cost incentive for the cartels to develop this themselves.” ...

The above passages are from an April 19 Associated Press investigative report headlined 'Cartels are scrambling': Virus snarls global drug trade published via AOL News.  

The entire AP report, put together by a team of journalists scattered around the world, is very interesting, very informative. But it was the mention of Wuhan that caused me to do a double-take. Despite all reasonable arguments to the contrary, claims persist that China's government did engage in a cover-up in the early days of the viral outbreak in Wuhan, or at the least delayed sharing vital data on the outbreak with other governments.  If the claim is correct surely the massive amounts of money from the fentanyl trade would have been a factor in any shoot-yourself-in-the foot decisions. 

At any rate, given that the supplier in question was state-owned, Beijing doesn't have the fig leaf of claiming a 'criminal element' was covertly running the enterprise.

But from the rest of the report, what goes around comes around; as with many other globalized industries, Mexico's drug trade is now looking to make what they'd previously imported from China. As to how long the self-reliance would last -- another truism is that when money talks nobody walks. However, if China's government is smart they'll forego the profits from fentanyl given the mind-boggling amounts of money they've lost from the pandemic-fueled slowdown in global trade.

By the way, that Wuhan was the epicenter of the fentanyl manufacturing trade could explain how that city became a huge global transport hub.  

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