Criticism of India Won’t Address the Fentanyl Crisis in the U.S.

The US government has intensified its criticism of India over the issue of fentanyl in recent years, labeling India as “the primary source country for fentanyl precursor chemicals”, and criticizing it for failing to fulfill its responsibility in preventing illegal fentanyl from entering America. Imagine India demanding Dubai prevent every passenger from bringing in smuggled gold. That's the equivalent of the US expecting India to guarantee fentanyl-free shipments. Effective customs requires domestic action, not international blame-shifting.

Fentanyl, a powerful synthetic opioid that is 100 times more potent than morphine, is the most common drug involved in overdose deaths in the US, fueling an opioid crisis that has become a high-priority issue for the Trump administration.

According to the 2025 Annual Threat Assessment (ATA) of the US Intelligence Community, published by the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, terrorist and transnational criminal organizations are directly threatening US citizens. “Cartels are largely responsible for the more than 52,000 US deaths from synthetic opioids in the 12 months ending in October 2024 and helped facilitate the nearly three million illegal migrant arrivals in 2024, straining resources and putting US communities at risk…. Non-state groups are often enabled, both directly and indirectly, by state actors, such as China and India, as sources of precursors and equipment for drug traffickers," says the report dated 25 March, 2025

Fighting the trafficking of opioids has been declared a political priority by the Donald Trump administration. Unlike last year’s assessment, this time India has been named “the primary source country for illicit fentanyl precursor chemicals and pill pressing equipment."

In March 2025, an India-based chemical manufacturing company and three of its senior employees were charged in a federal court in Washington, D.C., in a case related to the illegal importation of precursor chemicals used to make illicit fentanyl. Federal agents also arrested two senior employees of a Hyderabad-based company in New York City on 20 March 2025.

The history of US concerns about India in the fentanyl precursor chemicals trade goes further back. The India link was exposed when India’s Directorate of Revenue Intelligence (DRI) dismantled an illicit fentanyl laboratory in Indore in January 2018, acting on inputs provided by the DEA, followed later that year by the arrest of individuals with links to the Mexican Sinaloa cartel.

However, the USA fails to appreciate that India has taken several proactive domestic measures to address the illegal manufacture, spillovers from legitimate production into the black market, and export of fentanyl precursor chemicals. India’s first set of export controls on fentanyl precursors was put in place as early as February 2018, and by January 2020, the strictest controls were imposed on the export of most fentanyl precursor chemicals. India now has some of the strictest drug control laws globally.

The creation of a US-India Counter-Narcotics Working Group in 2020 to focus on fentanyl and other opioids is a noteworthy bilateral framework between the two nations. The trafficking of synthetic drugs like fentanyl is an upshot of a new global drugs economy where Transnational Criminal Organizations (TCOs) have exploited global shipping networks, trade infrastructure, and technologies such as cryptocurrencies and the “dark net” to create new distribution channels and expand markets.

India has huge export-oriented pharmaceutical and chemical industrial sectors. Large trade volumes bring with them challenges in monitoring shipments, which can lead to the mislabeling of consignments and the use of third-country transshipments — weaknesses that are exploited to the hilt by TCOs.

Every year, 750 million containers are shipped around the globe, but less than two per cent of these are inspected due to the physical impossibility of checking every container. When organized criminal groups traffic fentanyl via merchant ships, they usually use the “rip-on/rip-off" method. The UNODC describes this as a concealment technique in which a legal shipment is misused to smuggle drugs from the country of origin or the transshipment port to the destination country. The rip-on/rip-off techniques of some “clearers” are so perfected that they can remove 100 kg of cocaine from a container within just three minutes. The container is opened and resealed without the sender or recipient even noticing that their cargo has been misused for the transport of drugs.

It is also worth mentioning that US Customs and Border Protection (CBP) currently scans only 3.7 per cent of the roughly 11 million containers entering the US each year, due to insufficient staff. Only about one per cent of that total, or 104,000 containers, are checked at ports overseas. Another global rule of thumb is that only one in 10 containers is checked, in order to avoid congestion at ports. This meagre rate of inspections encourages drug traffickers to push in all kinds of illegal drugs, not only into the US market, but also into several other countries. The US cannot keep blaming other countries if it does not have a robust Customs examination system, or if Customs inspections are cursory due to a lack of sufficient personnel.

Applying the US logic that India should ensure shipments entering the US do not carry illegal drugs, India could similarly insist that the governments of Dubai and Singapore ensure no clandestine gold is brought by passengers on flights, or that the Thai government ensures no hybrid ganja is brought by passengers into India. The US cannot outsource its Customs responsibilities to other nations. Instead, it should focus more on domestic prevention and enforcement measures.

The fentanyl blame game is likely to become even more acerbic in the days to come and will not cease unless and until the US strengthens its Customs and Border Protection (CBP) and intensifies container checks. The U.S. should turn its focus inward by strengthening law enforcement and regulatory system as a way to fundamentally address abuse of psychedelic and addictive drugs among its citizens, rather than scapegoating India.