Is the BBC on Drugs or reporting on Drugs
Watch a video of this article on: https://youtu.be/jiuJuUo7vyQ
The BBC have done it again — blaming China in a headline that doesn’t reflect the truth of what really happened. It’s really hard to say that the BBC are telling lies and, if questioned, they’d definitely deny they lied but you can make your own mind up if this is a lie, or misinformation — either way, it’s no good complaining to the BBC they would say the truth is in the article — you can decide if that’s true or not:
Here’s the BBC headline: Mexico Claims Proof of Chinese Fentanyl Smuggling
After seeing this headline, we must believe there’s some proof — but the word “claims” tells us it’s not, it’s an allegation, not proof.
First of all, let’s look at some background. According to Germany’s DW magazine it’s not Mexico that claims this, it’s Washington. They claim Mexico produces fentanyl, Mexico says it does not. The President of Mexico has written to the President of China appealing for help and that’s probably because one of the Countermeasures China impopsed after Nancy Pelosi’s ill-advised visit to China last year was the suspension of assistance in their drug war. Washington can no longer ask China to help, because China isn’t taking their calls.
Mexico seized 7 tons of fentanyl last year alone and closed down 1383 illegal labs — so it’s clear that, whatever Mexico’s President says, there is a lot of Fentanyl in Mexico, whether it’s being made there or transits through there is not really the discussion here.
Mexico has a serious drug problem, in 2020, there were reports of 1,735 drug deaths. The USA however, has a drug epidemic of much more serious proportions. They registered over 107,000 deaths in the same period.
The problem isn’t supply, the problem is demand — but let’s get back to the story
The story starts with the line “a container with hidden packages of the drug was intercepted…”
If we only read the opening paragraph, we’re hooked into a belief that a massive drug haul was intercepted from China. Let’s read on…
The story then tells us a container with packages — it doesn’t say how many — weighing 34–35kg, that’s 75 pounds and, when we realise that 1kg of fentanyl has a street value of almost $450,000 our first thought must be Wow!
But then goes on to explain what that meant
The packages contained traces of fentanyl — what? Traces of fentanyl, what does that mean?
I’ll tell you what it means, it means that the container may have been legitimately used for carrying medicine in the past, fentanyl is a legitimate presecription drug, it’s made legally in several countries, which include China but under controlled circumstances. Traces of it can be in many places, but packages showing traces of the drug are not evidence of the presence of the drug.
According to the National Institute of Standards and Technology, a US Department of Commerce Laboratory, there are huge problems with drugs like fentanyl showing up in traces all the time. It doesn’t mean the drug was manufactured or even shipped in that container, it may mean the products in the container were once in contact with the drug or even the products before the the current products were loaded in there might have been in contact with the drug — even more worrying, it might mean that the person who loaded the container three shipments ago was in contact with the drug
In other words, a fork lift driver in the USA, several months ago might have carried microscopic samples of the drug into the container and that’s what the BBC doesn’t tell you in this report — how large were the trace samples BBC? This is journalism 101. Traces can be microscopic in size and could have arrived there through any one of a million different mediums.
If someone in your home has been using fentanyl, there will almost certainly be traces of it on your clothing, you will leave those traces wherever you sit or lean.
Traces of a drug do not mean presence of a drug. The BBC knows this, now, so do their viewers — or they will if we share this video widely enough or it gets enough “likes”.
While researching for this article, I came across another BBC doozy, this one was from 2013, which only goes to show they are nothing, if not consistent.
In 2013, they presented us with this fantastic headline, supported by an eerily similar photograph: Chinese Drug salesmen tell BBC they “routinely pay bribes”. Wow, Chinese drug salesmen paying bribes, sounds terrible doesn’t it — but again, I had to click onto the video to find out what was really going on and the information in it was different from the headline.
This one led me down a long path of research to a final result which was not visible on the BBC, or if it was, I couldn’t find it.
Again, it’s hard to say the BBC were lying, they weren’t, the salesmen the mentioned were indeed Chinese and they were even in China, they got that part completely correct. But the headline forgot to mention they worked for a British company, GlaxoSmithKline, who, of course, denied any wrong doing and said “some of the company’s staff, acted outside the companies processes”
What the BBC headline never mentioned was that the information came to light because Chinese police had arrested not just the GSK executive but four others in the pharmaceutical industry, all from “international companies. The upshot of this short, one and a half minute video on Chinese salesmen routinely paying bribes was reported 13 months later in the New York Times.
GSK pleaded guilty, the British Finance Controller was sentenced to 4 years but the the sentence was suspended and he was immediately deported. The company paid half a billion US Dollars in fines. But it didn’t end there, 2 years later, AstraZeneca was fined $4 million and GSK a further $20 million.
This wasn’t a few local Chinese salesmen acting illegally, this was an industry wide systemic corruption that China stamped out — But, according to the BBC’s reporter in this case — Foreign companies operating in China, have never faced a tougher time. I’ll bet they hadn’t!
I’d like to thank the BBC for their inspirational headline writing
