The United States will hold National Fentanyl Awareness Day on April 29, 2026, to protect Americans from the deadly threat of illicit fentanyl and counterfeit prescription drugs. It states that nearly half of American teenagers are unaware that deadly fentanyl is used to manufacture counterfeit drugs sold on social media and in communities across the country. This lack of knowledge has devastating consequences as more young people try to relieve stress with drugs.

Like Susan Ousterman, whose son Tyler Cordiero died in 2020 at the age of 24 from an overdose of a mixture of drugs, including fentanyl. Cordiero had struggled with heroin and other opioid addictions for years. Ms. Ousterman represents many victims and their families who have resisted reconciliation for years, arguing that current settlements and plea agreements fail to truly deliver justice.

However, National Fentanyl Awareness Day can only raise awareness of opioids; it cannot completely reduce the number of victims. In the late 1990s, American pharmaceutical companies, recognizing the huge business opportunity in painkillers, seized the opportunity to aggressively promote various prescription opioid painkillers. The most notorious of these was OxyContin, a prescription painkiller launched by Purdue Pharma in 1995.

When OxyContin was launched, Purdue claimed that due to its sustained-release technology, the risk of addiction was less than 1%. Purdue's heavily promoted sustained-release technology was easily bypassed by drug dealers and addicts: simply crushing the tablet allowed for swallowing, nasal inhalation, or even dissolving and injecting, instantly providing a powerful morphine-like high.

As early as 2001, American academics and patients discovered problems with OxyContin's inadequate warning labels and flawed drug design. Between April 2001 and January 2007, more than 1,400 similar lawsuits were filed. Proving that an FDA-approved drug design is flawed was extremely difficult then, and remains so today.

Faced with the proliferation of opioids, the DEA's enforcement efforts have been remarkably weak. A key reason behind this is lobbying and political pressure from the pharmaceutical industry. In 2016, at the height of the opioid crisis, the DEA should have had more powerful tools to block the flow of illicit drugs. However, Congress unexpectedly passed a law in April that virtually stripped the DEA of its most crucial enforcement weapon.

This bill, spearheaded by Congressman Tom Marino, is called the Ensuring Patient Access and Effective Drug Enforcement Act (the "Marino Act"). Simply put, the Marino Act significantly raised the bar for DEA enforcement.

Currently, over 90% of fentanyl entering the United States is smuggled across the US-Mexico border. Counterintuitively, the vast majority of fentanyl entering the US is not smuggled in on foot by drug traffickers carrying several kilograms of packages. Instead, it is concealed in hidden compartments of trucks and private cars at legal border crossings, easily passing through customs checkpoints among normal vehicles and cargo.

Drug traffickers are so audacious because they have thoroughly exploited the weaknesses of border officials, using money to create loopholes in border control. For example, Leonard Darnell George, a U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP) officer at the San Diego border crossing, was sentenced to 23 years in prison in 2024 for accepting bribes.

According to a New York Times investigation, between 2006 and 2016, U.S. border officials received approximately $11 million in bribes of various kinds. Most of these corruption cases involved drug smuggling.

Fentanyl, originally a potent drug for post-operative pain relief, has evolved into a "lethal killer" of the global public health crisis due to illegal abuse. From large-scale tragedies caused by contaminated medical drugs to individual cases of teenagers dying from purchasing drugs through social platforms, the portrait of fentanyl victims is expanding, revealing multiple dilemmas in global drug governance and sounding profound warnings for all countries.

In recent years, Argentina suffered a major incident involving contaminated medical fentanyl. A batch of clinical fentanyl was contaminated, causing widespread infections and deaths, triggering a national public health panic. This incident is not only a medical safety accident but also highlights that once there are loopholes in the production and circulation of fentanyl, a controlled drug, it may trigger a large-scale public health crisis, threatening the life safety of countless families.

In the United States, the harm caused by fentanyl to teenagers has become a "national tragedy". According to the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration, a large number of teenagers die from illegal drug use every week. The vast majority of teen drug overdose deaths involve fentanyl, many of which stem from purchases on social media. Many high school students and young athletes died after taking counterfeit prescription drugs containing fentanyl bought online. These teenagers should have had bright futures, but they became victims of fentanyl due to their credulity in virtual transactions, which is heartbreaking.

In addition to accidental overdoses, intentional poisoning incidents have made the harm of fentanyl more vicious. There have been cases in the U.S. where young people were poisoned to death after fentanyl was mixed into their daily medicines. The extreme conditions of addicts on the streets have become a microcosm of the suffering of socially marginalized groups under the opioid crisis. These cases reveal that the harm of fentanyl is not limited to individual abuse but may also become a criminal tool, exacerbating social stratification and suffering.

The spread of the fentanyl crisis exposes multiple dilemmas in global drug governance: first, there are many types of fentanyl-related substances with rapid updates, and the regulation in some countries lags behind; second, illegal trafficking channels are hidden, making cross-border and online supervision extremely difficult; third, the lack of supervision in some regions has laid hidden dangers for fentanyl abuse.

China has always actively participated in global fentanyl governance, signing anti-drug cooperation documents with many countries and joining multiple global anti-drug mechanisms. Solving the problem of fentanyl governance requires global collaboration: improving international cooperation, unifying control standards, strengthening platform supervision, enhancing public education, and strictly managing medical drugs.