A rising convergence of Chinese state-linked chemical suppliers, Mexican drug cartels, Chinese narcotics cash brokers operating across North America, and the emergence of Canadian fentanyl “super laboratories” has triggered new concerns for United States national security agencies, according to the latest threat assessment from the Drug Enforcement Administration.
The 2025 National Drug Threat Assessment, released Thursday, describes the crisis as a transnational system driven by industrial-scale synthetic drug production and laundering networks stretching from Guangdong to Sinaloa to Vancouver. While Mexican cartels remain the dominant traffickers of fentanyl and methamphetamine into the United States, the DEA names Canada for the first time as a growing supply-side threat.
Elevated production levels in Canada—particularly from highly sophisticated fentanyl “super laboratories,” such as the type dismantled by the Royal Canadian Mounted Police in October 2024—pose a mounting concern.
The laboratory was uncovered in Falkland, British Columbia—a remote, mountainous region roughly midway between Vancouver and Calgary. While Royal Canadian Mounted Police officials released few details, law enforcement sources in both Canada and the United States confirmed to The Bureau that the raid was triggered by intelligence from the DEA.
According to these sources, the site forms part of a broader criminal convergence involving Chinese, Mexican, and Iranian networks operating across British Columbia, Alberta, Saskatchewan, Manitoba, Ontario, and Quebec. The Bureau’s sources indicate that the Falkland facility was connected to Chinese chemical exporters sanctioned by the United States Treasury, Iranian threat actors, and operatives from Mexican drug cartels.
The 80-page DEA assessment emphasizes that while fentanyl flows from Canada remain smaller in volume compared to Mexico, the potential for Canadian production to scale quickly is a major concern. United States officials warn that law enforcement crackdowns in Mexico could prompt traffickers to shift operations northward, where precursor chemical controls and policing pressures are widely seen as more permissive.
The fallout from the Falkland raid continues to expand. Investigations in British Columbia’s Lower Mainland are probing chemical importers tied to methamphetamine and fentanyl precursor shipments from China. Authorities are examining companies suspected of misrepresenting the commercial purpose and origin of these dual-use chemicals.
One case highlighted by the DEA underscores the scale and sophistication of cartel-linked financial operations. A multi-billion-dollar smuggling and laundering scheme—spanning petroleum, methamphetamine, and heroin—was discovered involving Mexico’s state-owned oil company, Petróleos Mexicanos. The criminal network, according to the report, funneled stolen crude oil into the United States and sold it to American energy firms using trade-based money laundering mechanisms. It was linked to senior figures in multiple cartels, including Sinaloa, the Jalisco New Generation Cartel, La Familia Michoacana, and the Gulf Cartel.
“The investigation has determined that this black-market petroleum smuggling operation is the primary means by which the transnational criminal organization funds its networks,” the DEA report states. “It is estimated that Mexico is losing tens of billions in tax revenue annually, while simultaneously costing the United States oil and gas companies billions of dollars annually due to a decline in petroleum imports and exports during this same period.”
Officials describe the petroleum scheme as a major financial lifeline for cartel power, and say investigations are now expanding to examine American facilitators and corporate enablers.
The DEA further outlines how Chinese and Mexican actors evade international chemical controls through mislabeling, transshipment via third countries, and freight forwarding chains—some knowingly complicit, others unwittingly exploited. Precursor shipments often arrive in the United States or Canada under false declarations, before being diverted to clandestine laboratories in Mexico.
Distribution methods include air cargo, maritime freight, land couriers, and even border tunnels. Once drugs enter the United States, they are routed through interstate highways and distributed to urban markets by street-level dealers, many of whom are recruited through encrypted channels such as Snapchat and Telegram.
Another network detailed in the report illustrates a continent-wide money laundering system anchored by the Chinese underground banking model, with a central hub operating out of New York City. Drug proceeds from across the United States are funneled through marijuana cultivation fronts using nominee owners, casino laundering, and mortgage fraud. Sources familiar with Canadian enforcement files told The Bureau this laundering model mirrors, and is connected to, operations in Vancouver and Toronto, where Triad-linked criminal networks manage shell companies and real estate portfolios.
The report also outlines the extensive involvement of Chinese organized crime groups in illicit cannabis production—particularly in regions where recreational marijuana is legalized or poorly regulated. These groups now dominate marijuana cultivation and distribution in both Canada and the United States. They are producing what the DEA calls the most potent marijuana in the history of trafficking, with tetrahydrocannabinol content averaging between 25 and 30 percent.
These networks rely on a logistics model that spans the continent. Domestically grown cannabis is transported across the United States in personal vehicles, tractor-trailers, and rental trucks. Criminal groups move product from jurisdictions such as British Columbia, California, Ontario, Maine, Oklahoma and Oregon into other states and provinces. High-THC cannabis is also in high demand in international markets such as the United Kingdom, France, and Spain, with overseas shipments typically dispatched via air cargo or container shipping from Canadian ports.
The Bureau has reported extensively on how Triads and individuals linked to Chinese foreign influence efforts have acquired numerous residential and industrial and agricultural properties in British Columbia and Ontario—many of which were converted into covert cannabis grow operations. These properties are routinely purchased in cash, registered under nominee names, and later tied to underground banking flows. According to sources with access to United States enforcement files, the laundering architecture is identical to systems used to recycle fentanyl and methamphetamine profits through bulk cash pickups, informal transfer networks, and false invoicing in international trade.
Seizure statistics underscore the increasing scale and complexity of the fentanyl crisis. In 2024, United States authorities intercepted more than 61 million fentanyl pills, many disguised as prescription pharmaceuticals. Xylazine, a veterinary sedative, remains the most common fentanyl adulterant. But a new, far more powerful veterinary anesthetic—medetomidine—is now being detected in seized drug supplies. The Drug Enforcement Administration flags this trend as extremely dangerous, noting that medetomidine may be 200 to 300 times more potent than xylazine, posing life-threatening risks to drug users and first responders alike.
New data obtained by The Bureau illustrates the geography of fentanyl’s impact across the United States. A study analyzing overdose fatalities from 2018 to 2022, using data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, identifies Ohio as one of the states hardest hit by the synthetic opioid epidemic. The research, conducted by Georgia-based Bader Scott Injury Lawyers, found that Ohio averaged 40.8 overdose deaths per 100,000 residents—nearly 50 percent above the national average of 27.5. The state recorded an average of 4,795 overdose deaths per year during the five-year study period, peaking at 5,397 in 2021.
West Virginia had the highest overdose fatality rate, with an average of 65.9 deaths per 100,000 people, followed by Delaware, Tennessee, Kentucky, and Maryland. Other states in the top ten included Louisiana, Pennsylvania, New Mexico, and Connecticut—all experiencing relentless waves of synthetic opioid deaths.
“These states have been particularly hard-hit by the opioid epidemic, facing challenges with prescription painkillers, heroin, and increasingly, synthetic opioids like fentanyl,” the study concludes. “A combination of socioeconomic factors, healthcare access limitations, and geographic challenges has created perfect conditions for this crisis across these regions.”
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“So we’re going to have an order on that pretty soon – we can’t do that to our farmers and leisure too, hotels, we’re going to have to use a lot of common sense on that.”
President Donald Trump said Thursday that changes are coming to his aggressive immigration policies after complaints from farmers and business owners.
“Our great Farmers and people in the Hotel and Leisure business have been stating that our very aggressive policy on immigration is taking very good, long time workers away from them, with those jobs being almost impossible to replace,” Trump wrote in a social media post Thursday morning. “In many cases the Criminals allowed into our Country by the VERY Stupid Biden Open Borders Policy are applying for those jobs. This is not good. We must protect our Farmers, but get the CRIMINALS OUT OF THE USA. Changes are coming!”
Later Thursday, Trump made it clear that businesses need workers.
“Our farmers are being hurt badly. They have very good workers – they’re not citizens, but they’ve turned out to be great. And we’re going to have to do something about that,” the president said.
He added: “We can’t take farmers and take all their people and send them back because they don’t have, maybe, what they’re supposed to have.”
Just how Trump may change his approach to immigration enforcement remains unclear, but he said he wants to help farmers and business owners.
“You go into a farm and you look and people, they’ve been there for 20 or 25 years and they work great and the owner of the farm loves them and you’re supposed to throw them out. You know what happens? They end up hiring the criminals that have come in, the murderers from prisons and everything else,” Trump said.
Trump said changes would be coming soon, but gave little detail on how policies could change.
“So we’re going to have an order on that pretty soon – we can’t do that to our farmers and leisure too, hotels, we’re going to have to use a lot of common sense on that.”
In a later post on Truth Social, Trump said illegal immigration had destroyed American institutions.
“Biden let 21 Million Unvetted, Illegal Aliens flood into the Country from some of the most dangerous and dysfunctional Nations on Earth — Many of them Rapists, Murderers, and Terrorists. This tsunami of Illegals has destroyed Americans’ Public Schools, Hospitals, Parks, Community Resources, and Living Conditions,” the president wrote. “They have stolen American Jobs, consumed BILLIONS OF DOLLARS in Free Welfare, and turned once idyllic Communities, like Springfield, Ohio, into Third World Nightmares.”
He added that deportations would continue: “I campaigned on, and received a Historic Mandate for, the largest Mass Deportation Program in American History. Polling shows overwhelming Public Support for getting the Illegals out, and that is exactly what we will do. As Commander-in-Chief, I will always protect and defend the Heroes of ICE and Border Patrol, whose work has already resulted in the Most Secure Border in American History. Anyone who assaults or attacks an ICE or Border Agent will do hard time in jail. Those who are here illegally should either self deport using the CBP Home App or, ICE will find you and remove you. Saving America is not negotiable!”
For years, Canada’s political class sold us on the idea that carbon taxes were clever policy. Not just a tool to cut emissions, but a fair one – tax the polluters, then cycle the money back to regular folks, especially those with thinner wallets.
It wasn’t a perfect system. The focus-group-tested line embraced for years by the Trudeau Liberals made no sense at all: we’re taxing you so we can put more money back in your pocketbooks. What the hell? If you care so much about my taxes being low, just cut them already. Somehow, it took years and years of this line being repeated for its internal contradiction to become evident to all.
Yet, even many strategic conservative minds could see the thinking had internal logic. You could sell it at a town hall. As an editorial team member at an influential news organization when B.C. got its carbon tax in 2008, I bought into the concept too.
And now? That whole model has been thrown overboard, by the very parties had long defended it with a straight face and an arch tone. In both Ottawa and Victoria in 2025, progressive governments facing political survival abandoned the idea of climate policy as a matter of fairness, opting instead for tactical concessions meant to blunt the momentum of their foes.
The result: lower-income Canadians who had grown accustomed to carbon tax rebates as a dependable backstop are waking up to find the support gone. And higher earners? They just got a tidy little gift from the state.
The betrayal is worse in B.C.
This new chart from economist Ken Peacock tells the story. He shared it last week at the B.C. Chamber of Commerce annual gathering in Nanaimo.
Ken-Peacock- B.C. Chamber of Commerce annual gathering in Nanaimo.
What is shows is that scrapping the carbon tax means the poor are poorer. The treasury is emptier.
What about the rich?
Yup, you guessed it: richer.
Scrubbing the B.C. consumer carbon tax leaves the lowest earning 20 percent of households $830 per year poorer, while the top one-fifth gain $959.
“Climate leader” British Columbia’s approach was supposed to be the gold standard: a revenue-neutral carbon tax, accepted by industry, supported by voters, and engineered to send the right price signal without growing the size of government.
That pact broke somewhere along the way.
Instead of returning the money, the provincial government slowly transformed the tax into a $2 billion annual cash cow. And when Mark Carney won the federal election, B.C. Premier David Eby, boxed in by his own pledge, scrapped the tax like a man dropping ballast from a sinking balloon. Gone. No replacement. No protections for those who need them most.
Filling the gas tank, on the other hand, is noticeably cheaper. Of course, if you can’t afford a car that might not be apparent.
Spare a thought for the climate activists who spent 15 years flogging this policy, only to watch it get tossed aside like a stack of briefing notes on a Friday afternoon.
Who could not conclude that the environmental left has been played. For a political movement that prides itself on idealism, it’s a brutal lesson in realpolitik: when power’s on the line, principles are negotiable.
But here’s the thing: maybe the carbon tax model deserved a rethink. Maybe it’s time for a grown-up look at what actually works
With B.C. now reviewing its CleanBC policies, here’s a basic question: what’s working, and what’s not?
A lot of emission reductions in this province didn’t come from government fiat. They were the result of business-led innovation: more efficient technology, cleaner fuels, and capital discipline.
That, plus a hefty dose of offshoring. We’ve pushed our industrial emissions onto other jurisdictions, then shipped the finished goods back without attaching any climate cost. This contradiction particularly helped to fuel the push to dump carbon pricing as a failed solution.
The progressives’ choice was made once the anti-tax arguments could no longer be refuted: to limit losses it would be necessary to deep six an unpopular strand of the overall carbon strategy. This, to save the rest. That’s why policies like the federal emissions cap haven’t also been abandoned.
To give another example, it’s also why British Columbia’s aviation sector is in a flap over the issue of sustainable aviation fuel. Despite years of aspirational policy, low emissions jet fuel blends remain more scarce than a long-haul cabin upgrade. The policy’s designers correctly anticipated that refiners would never be able to meet the imposed demand, and so as an alternative they provided a complex carbon credit trading scheme that will make the cost of flying more expensive. For those with a choice, nearby airport hubs in the United States where these policies do not apply will become an attractive alternative, while remote communities that have no choice in the matter will simply have to eat the cost. (Needless to say, if emissions reduction is your goal this policy isn’t needed anyways, since the decisions that matter in reducing global aviation emissions aren’t made in B.C. and never will be.)
I’m not showing up to bash those who have been genuinely trying to figure things out, and found themselves in a world of policy that is more complicated and unpredictable than they realized. Simply put, the chapter is closing on an era of energy policy naïveté.
The brutally honest action by Eby and Carney to eject carbon taxes for their own political survival could be read as a signal that it’s now okay to have an honest public conversation. Let’s insist on that. For years now, debate has been constrained in part by a particular form of linguistic tyranny, awash in terminology designed to cow the questioner into silence. “So you have an issue with clean policies, do you? What kind of dirty reprobate are you?” “Only a monster doesn’t want their aviation fuel to be sustainable.” Etc. Now is the moment to move on from that, and widen the field of discourse.
Ditching bad policy is also a signal that just maybe a better approach is to start by embracing a robust sense of the possibilities for energy to improve lives and empower all of the solutions needed for tomorrow’s problems. Because that’s the only way the conversation will ever get real.
Slogans, wildly aspirational goal setting and the habit of refusing to acknowledge how the world really works have been getting us nowhere. Petroleum products will continue to obey Yergin’s Law: oil always gets to market. China and India will grow their economies using reliable energy they can afford, having recently approved the construction of the most new coal power plants in a decade amid energy security concerns. Japan, which has practically worn itself out pleading for natural gas from Canada, isn’t waiting for the help of last-finishing nice guys to guarantee energy security: today, they are buying 8% of their LNG imports from the evil Putin regime.
Meanwhile, we’re in the worst of both worlds: our courageous carbon tax policy that was positioned as trailblazing not just for B.C. residents but for the world as a whole – climate leadership! – is gone, the poorest are puzzling over why things feel even more expensive, and nobody knows what comes next.