FROM EIR DAILY ALERT

---

China Warns Trump that ‘Making America Great Again’ Depends on Stopping Drug Abuse

Dec. 12, 2018 (EIRNS)—China sent a wise message to Donald Trump today in the pages of Global Times, written by Ding Gang, a senior editor with People’s Daily, and a senior fellow with the Chongyang Institute for Financial Studies at Renmin University. America is suffering from a massive drug crisis, he writes, concluding:

“President Donald Trump vowed to ‘make America great again.’ How to realize it depends on not only the revitalization of the manufacturing industry, the improvement of competitiveness and having an edge in technology, but also on how the social climate turns out to be. Drug abuse has posed a test.”

Ding points to the agreement reached between Presidents Trump and Xi Jinping in Argentina aimed at stopping the abuse of the strong opioid fentanyl, but states that nonetheless:

“It is hard to find even one young person in the country who hasn’t tried drugs. The largest consumer of drugs, the U.S. uses 16,000 tons of marijuana, cocaine and heroin per year. According to U.S. government figures, the number of people who use at least one type of drug a year is approximately one-sixth of the country’s population.”

Ding acknowledges that China has its own drug problems, but

“the government and the entire Chinese society have always had a zero-tolerance policy to drugs. The government, schools and parents have jointly formed an extremely vigilant control network to prevent young people from using narcotics.”

But not in the U.S.: “Danger lies not only in drugs flooding the

market, but also in social tolerance of drug abuse,” he writes. “In the U.S., consuming marijuana is considered a private affair or even a manifestation of personality and taste. For instance, former President Barack Obama publicly admitted to smoking marijuana at an early age. More than that, many U.S. states have been making efforts to decriminalize the non-medical use of the narcotic.”