China's top prosecutor urges authorities to focus on illicit drug trafficking

China's top prosecutor urges authorities to focus on illicit drug trafficking

By Antoni Slodkowski

BEIJING (Reuters) – China's top prosecutor urged law enforcement officials across the country on Friday to focus their efforts on combating drug trafficking, capping a week in which Beijing and Washington announced a rare joint investigation into the fight against narcotics.

The Supreme People's Procuratorate issued “six typical cases,” involving actions ranging from mail fraud to parallel sales of illicit drugs by medical professionals, and clarified legal enforcement standards for handling such cases.

The prosecutor said in a statement that the release was intended to show his “determination and attitude to intensify efforts to suppress related crimes, while hoping that this series of typical cases will serve as a warning to society.”

The United States and China held high-level counter-narcotics talks on Thursday following a breakthrough in bilateral cooperation this week in which both sides battled a major money laundering operation of money linked to drugs.

The United States, where fentanyl abuse is a leading cause of death, has pushed China to step up law enforcement cooperation, including combating illicit financing and increasing controls on chemicals that can be used to make fentanyl.

These chemicals are often shipped to the United States and other destinations from China using postal packages that have unverifiable addresses or are mislabeled, experts say. The U.S. Postal Service has struggled with this problem for years.

One of the examples highlighted in the prosecutor's memo Friday involved the case of a Chinese buyer, named Yan, purchasing triazolam, a date rape drug, abroad and then reselling it in China by mail in poorly labeled packaging.

As a result, “the prosecution issued a prosecutorial suggestion to the postal administration department… urging the regulatory department to fulfill its primary responsibility and discharge its duties conscientiously.”

The postal administration then “urged the company to make rectifications as quickly as possible,” the prosecutor said.

The note states that “the prosecution invited nearly 100 couriers and students to attend the trial, focusing on the new characteristics and new forms of new drug cases, in order to publicize the anti-drug law” .

Mail fraud was briefly mentioned in opening remarks by Rahul Gupta, director of the White House Office of National Drug Control Policy, who spoke Thursday in Beijing with China's Minister of Public Security, Wang Xiaohong.

Gupta said it was one of the “areas in which we are both negatively affected”, ranking it alongside illicit financing, “illegal drug trafficking and consumption, and the emergence of new and more dangerous drugs.

(Reporting by Antoni Slodkowski; additional reporting by Beijing newsroom, editing by Timothy Heritage)