The US-China Precursor Agreement: Victory in the Fight Against Fentanyl?

In November 2025, President Donald Trump proved that decisive federal action, backed by American economic power and political will, can accomplish what years of local surrender, like San Francisco, never could.

The fentanyl epidemic ravages American communities with a ferocity unmatched in our history. More than a quarter million citizens perished to date, lives stolen by a synthetic opioid fifty times stronger than heroin; in few places is the carnage more visible than in California, particularly on the streets of San Francisco. The Tenderloin and SoMa neighborhood’s sidewalks are open-air drug markets.

Overdose deaths in the Golden State soared past 11,000 in 2023 alone. Yet while families buried sons and daughters, state and city leaders in Sacramento and San Francisco City Hall offered the same worn-out response: this crisis is too complex, too entrenched, too transnational to solve.

Officials declared the drug disaster effectively unsolvable without endless compassion, harm-reduction experiments, and billions in taxpayer funding for “supervised consumption sites” and needle exchanges. They were dead wrong.

Federal Strength Prevails, Local San Francisco Leadership Failed.

The landmark US-China precursor agreement, secured through tough America-first diplomacy, will choke the industrial supply of fentanyl at its source, China. While California’s (and San Francisco’s ) progressive Democratic establishment continues to insist that little to nothing can be done, Washington is demonstrating once again that strong national leadership succeeds where defeated municipal governance has all but given up.

The contrast could not be sharper. Under previous San Francisco Mayor London Breed and members of the Board of Supervisors, grieving families were repeatedly told that the city could only “manage” the crisis, not end it. Much of this stance continues today under Mayor Daniel Lurie. Governor Newsom, while deploying the California National Guard in limited fashion in April, 2023, has consistently framed fentanyl as an inevitable public-health challenge requiring European-style decriminalization and safe-injection facilities rather than confrontation. City Hall poured hundreds of millions into hotel rooms for the homeless, street outreach teams, and Narcan distribution while refusing to enforce basic quality-of-life laws.

The result was predictable: dealers operated with impunity, sidewalks remained littered with used needles, and overdoses multiplied. Progressive prosecutors declined to charge drug dealers. Judges released repeat offenders within hours. The message from California’s leadership was clear: expect more of the same, forever. They’ve had, and still have, no plan.

President Trump rejected that despair. Recognizing that Mexican cartels could not manufacture fentanyl and smuggle across the border at scale without the steady flow of precursor chemicals (ingredients necessary to manufacture fentanyl) from China, he imposed targeted 20 percent “fentanyl tariffs” on Chinese imports early in 2025. He made it clear to Beijing that these penalties would remain and escalate until the chemicals stopped. Late last month, President Xi Jinping relented.

By November 12, China had fully restricted all thirteen primary precursor ingredients and seven subsidiary chemicals, required export licenses for North America, and begun dismantling the online marketplaces that supplied cartel chemists. FBI Director Kash Patel returned from Beijing to announce that the new controls would “suffocate the cartels’ ability to manufacture this poison.” As San Francisco’s Board of Supervisors debates whether to fund another “linkage center,” where addicts can use drugs under medical supervision, federal action is drying up the drug supply itself. Community advocates including yours truly have been pleading for action for years.

While Governor Newsom lectures the nation about “compassion,” the Trump Administration used raw economic leverage to force the world’s second-largest economy to bend to American demands. The difference is stark: one approach treats symptoms and surrenders streets to chaos; the other attacks the root cause and demands results. The federal precedent should embarrass every elected official in Sacramento and San Francisco who spent years insisting the crisis was permanent.