Transcript of Ranking Member Krishnamoorthi’s Opening Statement from Hearing on the Chinese Communist Party’s Role in the Fentanyl Crisis

April 16, 2024
Press Release

WASHINGTON, D.C. – Today, the House Select Committee on the Strategic Competition Between the United States and the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) held a hearing on the CCP’s role in fueling and perpetuating the fentanyl crisis. The following witnesses provided testimony:

Below is a transcript of the opening statement from Ranking Member Raja Krishnamoorthi (D-IL). Footage of the Ranking Member’s opening statement can be found here, and his questions to the witnesses can be found here.

Thank you, Mr. Chair, and thank you everyone for being here today, especially the many members of our audience whose lives have been upended by the scourge of fentanyl. 

It’s estimated that 97 percent of illegal fentanyl entering the U.S. comes from the People’s Republic of China – which I’ll refer to as the PRC.

Now here are the fentanyl deaths in China in 2022 compared with the fentanyl deaths in the United States that same year. As you can tell, there were no reported deaths related to fentanyl in the PRC, whereas there were more than 76,000 in the U.S. that same year.

In America, we can’t understand for the life of us why the world’s leading producer of fentanyl experienced zero fentanyl deaths while we had 76,000.

This is not just an American problem. Across the world, fentanyl deaths are soaring – but apparently not in the PRC.

That discrepancy is the reason we’re here today – and that’s why we conducted a bipartisan investigation to better understand the CCP’s role in the global fentanyl crisis.

We certainly have a demand problem, which we need to work on in the U.S. But it’s undeniable that there is also a supply problem, and that the overwhelming majority of fentanyl precursor chemicals are being supplied by PRC companies.

Across multiple administrations, the U.S. has requested that the CCP take action against PRC companies that export fentanyl precursors for illicit purposes. But simply put, as our bipartisan investigation shows, the CCP hasn’t taken enough action. This lack of action is simply unacceptable.

First, we have called on the CCP to prosecute the companies and individuals in the PRC who export illegal fentanyl and fentanyl precursors. But they haven’t – even when we handed the CCP the names of those responsible and reams of evidence proving their crimes.

Second, the CCP promised us they would crack down hard on online drug networks that make it easy for Americans and other foreign buyers to access these drugs. But as our investigation shows, unfortunately the CCP hasn’t performed this crackdown, either.

Further, we asked the CCP to regulate their chemical companies and put them on notice that the drug trafficking they do abroad is illegal under the PRC’s own law. But they didn’t issue a public notice to their companies about this until just a few months ago. They should’ve done this much sooner. But they delayed and only put out a public notice because of the personal intervention of President Biden.

It is a positive sign that President Biden and Xi Jinping have re-established the Counternarcotics Working Group. Members of this group are actually meeting in Beijing right now.

Congress needs to act alongside President Biden in getting the CCP to take immediate action to stop the fentanyl crisis. The American people are demanding it. There must be accountability.

Recently, a young man from my home district in the Chicago suburbs, Shaun Poremba, was found dead from fentanyl poisoning – lying on a cold bathroom floor where he had been for more than 4 hours. Shaun was an actor, a guitar-player, and a 5-time national champion in the American Karate Association.

He left behind a fiancé, two stepkids, and his two parents. He was only 27 years old when he died.

We are here today because of the searing pain of Shaun’s family, and of so many families like Shaun’s, including many who are with us here today. That is why we conducted our investigation into the CCP’s role in the fentanyl crisis. And that is why we must act on our report’s policy recommendations.

It is time to solve this crisis now.

Thank you, and I yield back.

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