Fentanyl and China is the contemporary case John Kiriakou uses to argue that drug flows are tolerated for strategic reasons rather than merely failed against.
The argument
He arrives at it directly from the Afghan heroin story, in which a friend at the Drug Enforcement Administration explained that almost all Afghan heroin went to Iran and Russia and “we want them to be addicted to heroin. It makes their societies weaker.” Kiriakou then turns the same question on the present: “we have to ask ourselves, you know, 10 years later, 15 years later, the same question. Why won’t the Chinese stop the flow of fentanyl exactly into the United States? Because they want us to be addicted to fentanyl. It makes our society weaker.”[1][2]
Two supplies
Asked whether fentanyl is not also produced domestically by the Sackler family, Kiriakou separates the two: “That’s medical fentanyl.” The connection he allows is sequential rather than identical — people reach medical fentanyl “by the doctors. They get addicted to it and then that’s how they turn to the other one”, in some cases. He notes the family was fined a billion dollars in a class action and had its name stripped from museums.[3][4]
The illicit supply he describes as “Chinese-owned and it’s produced in Mexico and smuggled across the border”, and unregulated to the point of unpredictability — “a lot of it is so potent that there have been there have been examples of police officers who have fainted just from being in the presence of fentanyl and they have to be given Narcan to bring them back… It’s completely unregulated. It’s just you never know.”[4][5]
The personal register
Kiriakou does not leave the argument abstract. “who doesn’t have a friend or relative that’s died of a fentanyl overdose in the US? I have three friends who’ve lost children to fentanyl.”[3]
He tells one of the cases at length: a close friend who had been estranged from his daughter through a bitter divorce and had finally, once she was an adult, built a relationship with her. “She tells him she’s going to meet friends out at a bar in Washington. Two hours later, she’s dead… Because somebody offered a little bit of cocaine, it turned out to have fentanyl in it. It killed her instantly.” His summary: “And this happens every day in America.”[5][6]
The mirror calculation
Asked directly whether China might be using drug flows as a weapon in the way the CIA has, Kiriakou answered “yes, I would believe that.”[7]
His sourcing is professional rather than analytical: “friends of mine at the DEA have said over the years that that’s why the fentanyl problem is as bad as it is here in the United States. A lot of the fentanyl comes from Mexico, of course, but originates in China — or the precursors originate in China and are sent to Mexico to be manufactured there.”[7][8]
The symmetry is the argument: “the Chinese have the same calculation that the CIA does. We knew that Afghanistan was producing 93% of the world’s heroin, but that almost all of that heroin was destined for Russia and Iran, and it weakened their societies — that’s better for us if they’re weak. But the Chinese come to the same calculation: that fentanyl flooding into the United States weakens our society, and that’s better for the Chinese. So sure, I could see that as a long-term Chinese policy.”[8][9]
The reverse case, restated
Asked in April 2026 to follow the heroin argument to the present, Kiriakou made the symmetry explicit and gave it a source and a route: the fentanyl “is coming from China and Mexico”, and the motive he assigns is the one a DEA officer had given him for the American policy in Afghanistan — “they want us to be addicted to fentanyl because it weakens our society.” He offers it as the explanation of the present rather than as a prediction: “that’s why we’re in the predicament that we’re in.”[10]