In a recent op-ed in USA Today, Dr. Rahul Gupta, a former director of the White House Office of National Drug Control Policy, warned that President Donald Trump’s recent visit to China “produced few measurable outcomes” in the nation’s fight against the inflow of fentanyl. Gupta argued that the president must secure commitments from China during Xi Jinping’s upcoming trip to Washington.
The op-ed, which was co-authored with former deputy assistant secretary of state Brandon Yoder, noted that the fentanyl issue “received little attention” during Trump’s trip to China in May, despite it being a top public health threat facing the nation.
The Drug Enforcement Administration’s 2025 National Drug Threat Assessment pointed to China as a leading producer of precursor chemicals. Efforts to crack down on the production of fentanyl are complicated by the fact that many precursor chemicals have legitimate purposes.
There has been a bipartisan consensus on the need to work with China to address the fentanyl supply chain. The Biden administration’s 2022 National Drug Control Strategy said, “increased collaboration with the [People’s Republic of China] on shared drug priorities can disrupt drug trafficking networks, along with the corrupt or compromised systems that support them, and reduce the availability of dangerous synthetic drugs in the United States.”
In 2019, during the first Trump administration, the Office of National Drug Control Policy announced that it had secured commitments from China to address the fentanyl issue, including by “establishing recurring law enforcement cooperation meetings, rapidly responding to leads, expanding detection and narcotics laboratory capabilities, improving tracking of postal shipments, and launching joint investigations.”
More recently, Trump applied tariffs on China in part because of the nation’s role in supplying the chemicals that are driving the overdose epidemic. The CDC predicted that 69,673 overdose deaths occurred in 2025, driven by synthetic opioids like fentanyl.
Given that Trump and Xi will meet in Washington in September, Gupta and Yoder argued that the consequences of not securing commitments from Xi to address the inflow of fentanyl “will be measured in American lives”