China Spreads Drugs in Europe

July 8, 2002

Chinese drug cartels are setting up trade organizations and dummy companies to smuggle narcotics, says American Foreign Policy Council's China Reform Monitor, quoting the Berlin Die Welt.

Hundreds of Chinese "triads," each with up to 40,000 members, operate in China and Taiwan, according to the Federal German Intelligence Service.

"At Frankfurt airport, 452 kilograms of chemicals from China, which had been falsely declared, were recently confiscated. Instead of acetone for a Hamburg company, the eight drums contained piperonyl methylketone (PMK), a substance that is needed to produce synthetic drugs. The company is now under suspicion of having smuggled a total of 2.3 tons of the potential raw material for ecstacy - which can produce 30 million ecstacy tablets with a street value of about 300 million euros," says China Reform Monitor.

European police say hundreds of tons of drug chemicals are smuggled in every year from China.

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