Sam Cooper

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.

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.”

From the Daily Caller News Foundation

By Emily Kopp

The new head of Anthony Fauci’s former institute has accrued an extraordinary amount of research money and power in recent weeks despite a long career conducting just the sort of high-risk virology that President Donald Trump’s health leaders have vowed to stamp out.

Virologist Jeffery Taubenberger, a longtime Fauci ally who for more than a decade has defended the practice of enhancing viruses known as gain-of-function (GOF) virology, ascended to the top of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID) on April 24. His bosses, Health and Human Services (HHS) Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and National Institutes of Health (NIH) Director Jay Bhattacharya, oppose GOF as potentially catastrophic.

One week after Taubenberger became head of NIAID, HHS announced May 1 that it would make a half a billion-dollar investment in a vaccine technology co-invented by Taubenberger. Taubenberger could receive royalty payments and lab investments should the taxpayer-funded bet on the vaccine technology prove successful, according to government watchdog Open the Books (OTB).

Taubenberger’s rise to the top of the second largest subagency at Bhattacharya’s NIH follows a career marked by headline-grabbing GOF research.

Taubenberger’s most famous experiments involved what his lab’s website refers to as “archaevirology”— reviving the 1918 Spanish flu that killed up to 100 million people from a body preserved in permafrost. Taubenberger has also participated in experiments to splice genes from 1918 flu with contemporary H1N1 viruses. Critics like Kennedy and Bhattacharya say gain-of-function experiments like these have no public health benefit.

Taubenberger did not respond to requests for comment for this story.

‘The Complaining Crowd’

As the virologist behind some of the most famous GOF experiments in history, Taubenberger worked with Fauci to advocate for the discipline against the concerns from other scientists about lab-born pandemics, emails obtained through the Freedom of Information Act show.

“The complaining crowd”: That’s how Taubenberger referred in a May 2020 email to people concerned about one of the earliest and most hotly debated  GOF experiments — the creation of an airborne H5N1 avian influenza virus. The World Health Organization estimates the fatality rate of H5N1 to be roughly 50%.

Taubenberger’s elevation to NIAID director shows the practical challenges of “draining the swamp.” Kennedy and Bhattacharya, despite ambitions for upheaval, face an entrenched Washington bureaucracy.

Taubenberger’s leadership of the $6.6 billion institute is temporary, but it comes at a sensitive moment.

As the head of NIAID, the agency that underwrites most federally-funded GOF, Taubenberger is well-positioned to influence new regulations. His leadership coincides with a 120-day sprint to ban “dangerous gain-of-function research.” Trump signed an executive order on May 6 that started the clock on a four-month process to hammer out the precise language.

“I was very disappointed by the appointment of Jeffrey Taubenberger as head of NIAID,” Laura Kahn, a pandemic expert and coauthor of the book “One Health and the Politics of COVID-19,” told the Daily Caller News Foundation. “Given Taubenberger’s research history, his appointment suggests that such work will continue to be supported by NIAID despite Trump’s executive order. Have we learned nothing from COVID-19?”

Taubenberger’s reconstruction of the 1918 influenza virus “sent a terrible message to China and Russia that dangerous GOF work was acceptable,” Kahn said.

In contrast, virologists who support GOF have praised the pick.

“He’s a senior scientist at NIH and a collaborator of Matthew Memoli who was acting NIH director … Huge plus that the lab leak conspiracists over on X are so upset about it,” wrote University of Sydney virologist Eddie Holmes on BlueSky. Holmes is a collaborator of Taubenberger and one of the virologists who aided Fauci in downplaying a possible lab origin of COVID in 2020.

When the COVID-19 pandemic emerged, Taubenberger worked with Fauci’s disgraced senior scientific adviser David Morens to defend the researchers who had conducted GOF research in Wuhan. He and Morens coauthored a July 2020 scientific paper arguing that “theories about a hypothetical man-made origin” of the coronavirus “have been thoroughly discredited.”

The article published at an opportune time for Wuhan Institute of Virology collaborator Peter Daszak, whose organization EcoHealth Alliance faced the possible clawback of NIH funding if it couldn’t produce critical data about its coronavirus research in China. Morens described the article as one that “defends Peter and his Chinese colleagues.”

Sure enough, Daszak received a new $7.5 million grant from NIAID by August 2020 even without turning over information from Wuhan.

Morens later faced bipartisan criticism in 2024 for emails exposing his attempts to evade the Freedom of Information Act in his communications with Daszak, a longtime friend. Morens said that he would “delete any smoking guns.”

With help from officials within NIH like Taubenberger, Daszak stalled the suspension of his NIH funding. It was roughly four years later, after a congressional investigation, that EcoHealth and Daszak faced a federal funding suspension and, eventually, debarment.

‘Nature Is The Ultimate Bioterrorist’

Taubenberger’s public statements on GOF research — while more measured than the private communications mocking people with concerns — contrasts starkly with that of his bosses.

“In considering the threat of bioterrorism or accidental release of genetically engineered viruses, it is worth remembering that nature is the ultimate bioterrorist,” reads Taubenberger’s 2012 article defending the avian influenza experiment.

That position directly contradicts comments Bhattacharya gave on May 7 in a television interview citing that work as emblematic of the GOF the NIH plans to fetter out.

“That avian influenza work, I think it was in 2010 or 2011, and it led President Obama to actually put a freeze on all gain-of-function work which President Obama lifted almost on his last day in office in 2017,” Bhattacharya said in an interview with Newsmax. “Anything that puts the American people at risk like this is not something we at the NIH should be doing.”

Kennedy too was critical of that experiment in his 2023 book “The Wuhan Cover-Up And the Terrifying Bioweapons Arms Race.”

Morens grumbled in an April 2020 email that he and Taubenberger had defended GOF research before against “Ludditism.”

“I am sure both of you remember the GOF attacks of a decade ago,” he said. “tony, me, Jeff Taubenberger, and many others here had to do battle with a lot of craziness. … It was much less [sic] about science than [it] was about Ludditism.”

In a separate May 2020 email, Morens reiterates the important role that he and Taubenberger played in advocating for GOF and combating the concerns of scientists at Stanford University, Harvard University and Rutgers University, which he described as “demagoguery.”

“As Tony’s scientific advisor, i spent much of the year, along with Jeff T, helping brief him and get him up to speed,” he said.

‘Leopard That Hasn’t Changed Its Spots’

The COVID-19 pandemic did not appear to dampen Taubenberger’s enthusiasm for GOF research. Taubenberger said in a December 2022 podcast interview with another prominent advocate for GOF virology that he aspired to revive other pre-1918 pandemic viruses through “archival tissues” from human autopsies, including viruses that caused pandemics in the Middle Ages.

“With the newer molecular techniques, I’ve consistently remained hopeful that someday the magic tissue sample will be found,” Taubenberger said.

The Central Intelligence Agency, the Federal Bureau of Investigation and the Department of Energy all have intelligence pointing to a lab origin of COVID-19.

Taubenberger’s support of GOF research three years after COVID-19 emerged is troubling, according to Andrew Noymer, an associate professor of population health and disease prevention at the University of California, Irvine.

“Any leopard that hasn’t changed its spots already in the light of SARS-CoV-2, I’m skeptical will change its spots now,” Noymer said to DCNF. “I’m all for road to Damascus conversions, but if you can be pro-gain of function in December 2022, then it seems to me you’re a dyed in the wool pro-gain-of-function person and therefore not the right choice to implement the recent executive order.”

Vaccine ‘Gold’

Within a week of Taubenberger taking the reins at NIAID, he started ruffling feathers.

HHS will devote massive departmental resources toward the development of a flu vaccine platform co-owned by Taubenberger in the hopes it will provide broad protection against multiple strains of pandemic-capable flu viruses, the department announced earlier this month.

HHS has dubbed the initiative “Generation Gold Standard.”

The money has been rejiggered from a $5 billion investment by the Biomedical Advanced Research and Development Authority (BARDA) and NIAID in next generation COVID-19 vaccines announced in 2023.

The vaccine prototypes — blandly named “BPL-1357” and “BPL-24910” — are BPL-inactivated whole-virus vaccines, a technology that has been in use since the 1950s. “BPL” stands for beta-propiolactone, a chemical used in vaccines to inactivate viruses, destroying their infectivity while retaining their ability to provoke an immune response.

Taubenberger holds two patents titled “Broadly Protective Inactivated Influenza Virus Vaccine.”

The new investment builds on the research of Taubenberger and his longtime collaborator Matthew J. Memoli, Bhattacharya’s principal deputy.

HHS said in its statement announcing Generation Gold Standard that the investment has “freedom from commercial conflicts of interest.”

But there’s another apparent conflict of interest: Should the vaccine prove safe and effective, Taubenberger could earn up to $150,000 annually and additional funds for his lab, per an investigation into NIH royalty payment rules by OTB.

NIH insists firewalls prevent the undue influence of patent holders on grant-making decisions but with few specifics. Then-NIH Acting Director Lawrence Tabak could not precisely describe the firewalls when pressed by congressional Republicans in May 2022, according to an August 2023 OTB investigation.

Some scientists criticize the surge in HHS resources toward a decades-old technology, according to press reports.

The investment is a major career milestone for Taubenberger, a Fauci-aligned expert who has not only survived but thrived in a department now led by self-declared “renegades” like Kennedy.

The success comes despite a career and declared worldview starkly at odds with the renegade ethos of his bosses.

“My wife bought me a mug that says ‘my medical degree is worth more than your Google search,’” Taubenberger said in the 2022 podcast interview.