What Happened Today: January 24, 2023
Massacres in California; Secularism & Death; Pope Benedict speaks from the grave; Fentanyl denial in D.C.
The Big Story
A total of at least 19 people have been killed after the second mass shooting in California over the past 72 hours. This marks one of the most deadly stretches of gun violence in the United States since the 1980s—and one in which, unusually, both suspected perpetrators were older than 65, defying the standard profile of mass shooters, who are typically in their thirties.
Seven people were killed on Monday in two related shootings at a pair of farms around Half Moon Bay, a coastal enclave south of San Francisco. Law enforcement hasn’t released a motive for Monday’s shootings but says the gunman, an agricultural worker at one of the farms, appeared to have targeted specific individuals. A 67-year-old suspect, Zhao Chunli, was arrested in the parking lot of a local police station where authorities found him and the semiautomatic weapon believed to have been used in the shootings.
The Half Moon Bay shooting came on the heels of the shooting at a dance ballroom event celebrating the Lunar New Year in Monterey Park on Saturday night; 11 people were killed and nine others injured. The suspected shooter in that case, a 72-year-old man, attempted to enter a second dance club nearby. Thwarted there by a club employee who wrestled away his weapon, the gunman took his own life 12 hours later during a showdown with police.
According to gun-shooting database The Violence Project, only one of the 185 mass shootings between 1966 and 2022 were committed by a shooter aged 70 years or older, marking these two gunmen of retirement age to be unusual outliers. A Mother Jones database shows that since 1982, the average age of a mass shooter has been 35 years.
Read More: https://www.sfgate.com/news/article/At-least-4-killed-in-Northern-California-17737163.php
In the Back Pages: Why Washington Ignored Warnings About Fentanyl
The Rest
→ Suicides, alcoholic liver diseases, drug overdoses, and other deaths of despair have devastated white Americans with low levels of education over the past two decades, with much of the soaring rate of mortality attributed to the opioid epidemic. But a provocative new working paper from economists at the National Bureau of Economic Research, The Ohio State University, Wellesley College, and University of Notre Dame suggests the increase in deaths began well before opioids hit the scene in the late 1990s, and that it could just as much be a result of the abrupt decline in religiosity and church attendance that began in the 1980s.
“We know of no other cultural phenomenon involving such large, widespread changes in participation prior to the initial rise in U.S. mortality,” the researchers observe. “Nor do we know of any other phenomenon that matches the seemingly idiosyncratic patterns observed for mortality.”
Though other “unobserved phenomenon” could account for both the drop in church attendance and the rise in deaths of despair, the researchers also examined three states that repealed blue laws in 1985, long after many other states lifted the prohibition on liquor sales and other activities to ensure an observance of the Sabbath on Sundays.
Upon lifting the blue laws, religious participation dropped by as much as 10%. And compared to other states where religious participation remained stable, the three states saw a notable uptick in deaths of despair.
“Applying these results to the decline in religion at the end of the century suggests that this decline could be responsible for a reasonably large share of the initial rise in deaths of despair.”
Read More: https://www.nber.org/system/files/working_papers/w30840/w30840.pdf
→ You see that pile of papers on your kitchen counter? You might want to make sure they don’t include any classified documents, as secret files seem to be popping up everywhere these days. Former vice president Mike Pence’s attorneys recently found “a small number of documents bearing classified markings that were inadvertently boxed and transported” to the Pence residence, according to a letter written by a Pence advisor sent to the National Archives last week. The former VP was unaware the documents were in his house, according to the advisor, Gregory Jacob, and they had only been found after he solicited an attorney to review his files in the wake of several batches of classified papers recently discovered in the home and former office of President Joe Biden.
→ Number of the Day: $33.7 billion
That’s how much money New Jersey residents have spent so far on sports gambling since 2018, when the state first legalized sports betting. Over that same period, calls to the Garden State’s gambling addiction helpline have almost tripled, to 27,000 calls in 2022. All of which would help explain the findings of a forthcoming Rutgers University study that found 13% of New Jersey residents now qualify for the conditions of a gambling problem, compared to 4% nationwide. Surpassing even Nevada for sports wagers, New Jersey’s sports betting has been an economic boon for the state government, earning the treasury $453 million in taxes in 2022, a 115% jump from when the sports gambling began. “We’ve seen a correlation in the amount wagered compared to the amount of helpline calls we’ve seen,” said Felicia Grondin, the director of the Council on Compulsive Gambling. “The more wagering, the more people are reporting a problem.”
→ Rumor Radar™ (A Feature, Not a Bug, of The Scroll):
Pope Benedict XVI, who passed away in December with the title of pope emeritus after retiring from his post atop the Catholic Church in 2013, levied several explosive charges against the Church and his successor, Pope Francis, in a new posthumously published book called What Christianity Is. Coverage of the book has so far been limited, but according to reports, the former pope claimed that the Church’s training program for new priests is now on the verge of collapse, several bishops around the world have “rejected the Catholic tradition as a whole, aiming in their dioceses to develop a kind of new, modern catholicity,” and multiple U.S. seminaries are home to “homosexual clubs [that] operate more or less openly.” Benedict was an advocate for a more traditional approach to doctrinal issues compared to his successor, and his book joins several other texts published in the growing dispute between conservative and progressive flanks of the Church wrestling over the future of Catholicism. The Vatican has yet to comment.
→ On Tuesday, Columbia University will mark the occasion of International Holocaust Remembrance Day with a presentation of StoryFile, an artificial intelligence video tool that creates holographic representations of Holocaust survivors that can virtually respond to questions in real time. As Tablet’s Creative Director Matthew Fishbane observed of the emerging software in 2020, there are many moral questions raised around “a technology that could end up being quite profitable and widespread on the slightly lurid but morally unimpeachable life stories of old Jews who hadn’t died in WWII.” And indeed StoryFile has found new streams of revenue beyond Holocaust survivors. As participants at the panel on Tuesday might learn, the AI video makers have begun working with prominent civil rights leaders as well as survivors of Russian war crimes in Ukraine, blurring the line between stories told for historic memory and stories used to make money.
Read More: https://www.tabletmag.com/sections/arts-letters/articles/dimensions-in-testimony-holocaust-survivors
→ Headlines in Translation:
Today our headlines come from La Opinion, a Spanish-language newspaper that is the second most read print publication in Los Angeles after The Los Angeles Times.
Massive suspension of flights on January 11 were result of mistakenly deleted files // “Sexual violence does not go unpunished”: spokesman for the Government of Catalonia applauds the decisions on the case of Dani Alves // Mexican mayor resigns after 17 days in office due to death threats // In the past three years, there have been more than 300 attacks against Catholic churches in the U.S. // Chiquis Rivera shows off her curves and sings Shakira’s song dedicated to Gerard Piqué // Rolling a banknote in cinnamon: a ritual to receive money immediately // Classified documents found in the house of former U.S. Vice President Mike Pence // Disney officially shuts down “Splash Mountain” after 30 years for its racist stereotypes
→ Quote of the Day:
I want to congratulate and thank you for an absolutely stunning achievement: You have brought together Republicans and Democrats in an absolutely unified cause.
That’s the Democratic senator from Connecticut, Richard Blumenthal, passing along faint praise to Joe Berchtold, the Live Nation executive who sat with several other concert-industry leaders for a bipartisan grilling at a Senate judiciary committee hearing on Tuesday. The subject at hand was Taylor Swift. More specifically, the mishandling of concert sales by Live Nation’s Ticketmaster, which left millions unable to buy tickets during a small sale window. Since Live Nation merged with the ticket giant in 2010, the company has become the dominant player in the live-concert business by a wide margin, stamping out competition and leaving consumers with few alternative options for buying tickets. “You leverage market power in one market to get market power in another,” Josh Hawley, Republican senator from Missouri, told Berchtold. The ultimate decision to potentially break Live Nation’s monopoly will come down to the Justice Department, which is currently investigating the company.
→ The New York Stock Exchange temporarily shut down trading for Morgan Stanley, Nike, Verizon, and dozens of other major companies after wild price swings triggered trading halts that the exchange identified as a “technical issue” without offering any more specifics. Though previous incidents of technical glitches precipitated rapid swings in stock prices, the unusual move to pause opening auction trades for some 40 stocks prompted a preliminary probe into what happened by the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission. “It’s a little concerning; these are not your typical meme stocks, easily manipulated companies,” Oanda senior market analyst Ed Moya told Bloomberg. “These are some of the giants.”
TODAY IN TABLET:
The Magical Mossad Mystery Tour by Peter Theroux
A former U.S. intelligence officer visits some old friends
Lee Bollinger, Columbia University’s Invisible Man by Armin Rosen
The man who presided over the growth, enrichment, and intellectual and moral decline of New York’s greatest university embodied the workings of 21st-century power through a masterful two-decade-long disappearing act
SCROLL TIP LINE: Have a lead on a story or something going on in your workplace, school, congregation, or social scene that you want to tell us about? Send your tips, comments, questions, and suggestions to scroll@tabletmag.com.
Did Washington Ignore Warnings About Fentanyl?
Conversations with former DEA agents reveal how a nexus of Chinese producers and Mexican cartels brought the deadly drug into the U.S.
By Jonathan Alpeyrie
“We are losing an entire generation due to drugs,” said Michael Cole, the founder of Lauren’s Wish Addiction Triage Center, an organization named after the daughter he lost to a fentanyl overdose. Growing up in West Virginia, Lauren was a strong student, athletic, and kind to others. At 16 she became addicted to opioids. She died on July 9, 2020, at the age of 26.
Driven largely by fentanyl, drug overdoses are now the leading cause of death among Americans ages 18 to 45. In 2020, close to 92,000 Americans died of a drug overdose, but the number rose sharply during the pandemic and lockdowns. In 2021, life expectancy in the U.S. hit its lowest point in two decades. In 2022, there were 109,000 overdose deaths, according to provisional data from the Centers for Disease Control, with deaths from synthetic opioids up 80% over the same period and most of those attributable to fentanyl.
Other countries in the world don’t come close to America’s level of illegal drug consumption—or to its death tallies. The U.S. now consumes about 85% of all the world’s opiates. As a result, the rate of overdose deaths is around 20 times higher in America than the global average.
To understand how it is that a deadly and highly addictive poison has flooded the streets of American cities and small towns, one has to untangle the knot of connections linking Chinese drug manufacturers, Mexican cartels, and a homegrown culture of addiction that uses chemical remedies to treat economic and spiritual woes. That globalized and lethal supply chain, which is enriching criminal cartels while undoing the fabric of American life, is in part the result of shortcomings in U.S. policy, multiple former agents from the Drug Enforcement Administration told Tablet. According to them, the federal government failed to respond to repeated warnings about the coming fentanyl crisis, even as the casualties began to mount.
On Dec. 11, 2001, China was brought into the World Trade Organization—the culmination of a bipartisan commitment to free-market fundamentalism among America’s political and economic elite. In short order, China became the world’s factory, first developing into a regional and then international power, competing directly with the U.S. and Europe for commercial opportunities, patents, and political hegemony. No longer just a producer of cheap consumer goods, today China exports high level and strategic products like semiconductor chips, industrial chemicals, and pharmaceuticals to Western markets.
Derek Maltz, a former agent in charge of the Special Operations Division at the Drug Enforcement Administration who retired after working for the agency for 28 years, has long believed that China is the driving force behind America’s fentanyl crisis. 2005 and 2006 were marked by “a massive [number of] fentanyl deaths in the Midwest, but no one knew where it was coming from and who was producing it,” Maltz told Tablet. An investigation in partnership with the Mexican Authorities identified the lab in Mexico producing the fentanyl and shut it down. Then in 2007, more than $200 million was discovered in a house in Mexico City. DEA officials were surprised to learn that the Chinese national who owned the house was holding a Mexican passport and, according to Mexican authorities, had close ties with Sinaloa cartels. At that time the DEA did not conclude that Chinese criminals were involved in the production of fentanyl—only that the country was involved in the production of large amounts of precursor chemicals to assist the Mexican cartels in the production of methamphetamines. Maltz later became suspicious of China’s role in the fentanyl crisis in 2012, when Americans began dying of drug overdoses at an even higher rate. “I knew in my mind that there was a correlation between Chinese criminals and Mexican cartels,” he said.
More DEA investigations and raids found that various Mexican cartels were receiving the chemical component for their fentanyl labs—N-(1-Phenethyl-4-piperidyl) propionanilide citrate—directly from China. As their investigations developed, the DEA discovered that two main Mexican cartels, Sinaloa and Jalisco New Generation, were working closely with Chinese nationals to bring the chemicals to Mexico.
These investigations did not, however, disrupt the production labs in China or Mexico, nor did they slow the growing overdose epidemic in the United States. Even with Chinese nationals turning up in Mexico, it was difficult to prove the Chinese government had any direct involvement in the fentanyl trade. According to Paul Campo, a retired DEA official with 25 years of experience (he has since founded a consulting firm, Global Financial Consultants, which focuses on anti-money-laundering securities), few in the DEA recognized how bad the fentanyl problem was becoming. “When I was working cases in the early 2000s, we did not think initially that fentanyl was much of an issue, as it was produced, transported and sold legally to the U.S. for medicinal purposes,” he explained. “Furthermore, fentanyl was mixed into heroin, making it very hard to trace at the time.”
But the death count continued climbing, with limited federal government intervention. In 2014 and 2015, senior DEA officials tried to communicate the urgency of the issue to the Obama administration, and met with Eric Holder, then the U.S attorney general, telling him that the deadly issue would get worse if the government failed to take action. Increasing amounts of fentanyl—and increasingly strong product—was entering the country. “In Arizona alone,” Maltz said, “we went from zero in 2015 to seizing more than 25 million pills in 2022.” Much of that growth is the result of the Obama administration’s inaction. “As far as I’m aware, the Obama administration never pressured China,” Maltz said. It was only during Trump’s presidency in 2019 that China placed fentanyl and its analogues on a regulatory schedule, making them more difficult to produce and distribute. By then, however, it was too late: In 2022, over 50.6 million fentanyl-laced pills and 10,000 pounds of fentanyl powder were seized in the U.S. by the DEA—enough to kill every American citizen.
China’s chemical output has proven difficult to monitor. “It is almost impossible to see what is going on inside that country,” Maltz said. “Both the Mexican cartels and the Chinese government are very creative in countering our federal agencies.” Chinese traffickers are using various strategies to circumvent new regulations, including producing more chemical precursors (chemicals that are transformed into fentanyl), relocating some manufacturing to India, and rerouting precursor shipments through third countries. China’s weak supervision and regulation of its chemical and pharmaceutical industries also enable evasion and circumvention.
While tracking the chemicals coming from China to Mexico is difficult, tracking the vast sums of money being made by Mexican cartels in U.S. drug markets is even harder. By using complex Chinese financial technologies, mobile banking apps, and social media networks to evade authorities, money made by Mexican cartels often ends up washed and cleaned in China, and cooperation between the United States and China remains limited. U.S. law enforcement agencies have established working groups, conducted high-level meetings, and shared information with their Chinese counterparts—and this has led to the dismantling of a few illicit fentanyl networks—but it seems that it has hardly made a dent in the exportation of chemicals, which still flood America’s streets.
Since China’s government began monitoring fentanyl, however poorly, the amount of finished fentanyl (fentanyl that is fully produced) shipped directly from China to the United States has declined while the amount shipped from Mexico to the United States has increased. It is impossible, however, to know by how much. DEA officials believe that Chinese traffickers have shifted from primarily manufacturing finished fentanyl to primarily exporting fentanyl’s chemical ingredients to Mexican cartels, who manufacture the final product and then push it across the border.
Additionally, U.S. law enforcement has seen a growing trend of Chinese nationals in both Mexico and the United States working with Mexican cartels. As Chinese suppliers coordinate more with international partners, former and current members of the DEA are concerned that fentanyl, like almost every other product Americans consume, be it cars or pharmaceuticals or iPhones, has found success by globalizing its production chain.
Cartels have become skilled at producing and refining fentanyl. These cartels are also savvy and entrepreneurial—they were quick to understand how addictive and profitable fentanyl would be after observing the success of Oxycodone, which was foisted onto the general public by America’s pharmaceutical companies.
Fentanyl, like most synthetic drugs being produced in Mexico, is so cheap to make that almost anyone with a bit of startup money and can-do spirit can get into this new business venture. It is far cheaper (and therefore more profitable) to produce than other drugs: The opium needed to produce a kilogram of heroin, for instance, can cost producers as much as $6,000. The precursor chemicals to make a kilogram of fentanyl, meanwhile, costs $200 or less. With chemicals easily imported from China, a fentanyl entrepreneur only needs a pill press, protective gear, and a few underlings willing to risk their lives for money to create a fentanyl fiefdom. “What worries me is how proficient these cartels have become in synthesizing and producing these drugs,” Campo explained. “It is truly the devil’s work.”
Not only is it easy to produce, but it is also easy to hide. “We used to catch loads of fentanyl hidden in Lego box sets, or even inside coconut fruit containers,” Campo said. Now that so many small criminal organizations in Mexico are jumping into the frothy fentanyl market, it has become much harder. “This has created numerous independent groups who do not need powerful criminal syndicates to make and sell their product.”
San Diego has become the epicenter of the illegal fentanyl market. Last year alone, more than 5,000 pounds of fentanyl were captured by border authorities based in the city—more than 60% of the fentanyl apprehended nationally. This constitutes a small portion of what is actually being sold in America. Campo believes that barely 20% of the fentanyl that comes into the U.S. is seized by authorities. “In truth, no one really knows what the real number is. All we know is that even if 20% is captured each year, it is worth it. The cartels are making so much money on synthetic drugs.”
Romain Le Cour Grandmaison, a senior expert on transnational organized crime at the Global Initiative, believes it’s far less. “From our calculation, the U.S. authorities do not catch more than 10% of what is going through. It is so low because the drugs are hidden within legitimate containers and therefore integrated within legal goods.” This strategy makes it impossible for the authorities to check all containers, as it would seriously impair global trade. “Only 3% of containers around the world are checked by legal authorities,” Grandmaison explains. Countries cannot afford to do much more checking, as they would lose too much money by doing so.
The drug also moves fluidly across heterogeneous communities of the United States, making addicts of all kinds of Americans. This is both because of how powerfully addictive it is, but also because it’s now used to cut virtually every other drug on the market. A person who uses meth or heroin or cocaine might be taking fentanyl without realizing it, and can easily end up addicted to a drug that is profoundly lethal. A dose of 2 milligrams of the drug is enough to kill most users—an amount so minuscule that in a test tube it looks like a few grains of salt clinging to the glass. Crime labs now keep auto-injectors of Naloxone, the lifesaving opioid receptor antagonist, within reach in case their personnel are accidentally exposed to traces of the drug.
Yet fentanyl’s addictive qualities don’t explain why the European Union suffered only 6,400 overdose deaths in 2020 while the U.S., with a significantly smaller population, suffered more than 90,000. While the U.S. does prescribe and sell more synthetic drugs, that does not explain the uniquely American phenomenon of the overdose epidemic either.
One cause of the illegal drug crisis is America's legal drug crisis. Opioid-based legal drugs have been pushed onto the general public for over a century, enriching pharmaceutical companies. From 1939 to 1959, drug sales rose from $300 million to $2.3 billion, with prescription drugs accounting for almost the entire increase. By 1969, prescription drugs made up 83% of consumer spending on pharmaceuticals. All of this has amounted to extraordinary profits for the pharmaceutical industry. In 2010, prescription drugs constituted $291 billion of business; in 2022, $424 billion. In 2017, 4.1 billion prescriptions were filled; in 2021, 4.69 billion. These profits have become a dependable form of tax revenue for the government.
In contrast, the European Union has far more stringent laws regarding the accessibility of opioid-based prescription drugs, and while American pharmaceutical companies lobbied doctors to prescribe these pills, EU doctors were directed to severely limit their use.
With illegal addictive drugs produced just over the border and legal addictive drugs pushed by domestic producers and pharmaceutical companies, Americans find themselves squeezed from both sides. The chains of production and supply that have contributed to unprecedented prosperity in the United States by relying on cheap labor and goods from Mexico and China, are hollowing America out from the inside, creating a permanent underclass of addicted citizens and a spiraling crisis of dependency and death.
Note: This article has been updated to clarify comments made by Derek Maltz.
Jonathan Alpeyrie is a photographer whose work has appeared in Newsweek, The Boston Globe, Le Monde, Der Speigel, Le Figaro and The Atlantic. He has covered numerous conflict zones, in the Middle East and North Africa, the South Caucasus, Europe, North America, and Central Asia.
When the legacy media ignore the source of fentanyl , the massive abuses of human rights in China and China's suppression of any real criticism, the results are woke corporations that never say a critical word about China, Chinese money "donated"to university think tanks and politicians who are completely beholden to Beijing. The idea that China would be normalized by doing business with the West was naive to say the least
When the legacy media ignore the source of fentanyl , the massive abuses of human rights in China and China's suppression of any real criticism, the results are woke corporations that never say a critical word about China, Chinese money "donated"to university think tanks and politicians who are completely beholden to Beijing. The idea that China would be normalized by doing business with the West was naive to say the least