DEA veteran Don Im’s exposé uncovers a deadly fusion of crime, commerce, and state power industrializing addiction and corruption, echoing historical drug empires but amplified by globalization.

By Sam Cooper | The Bureau

Summarized

DEA veteran Don Im exposes a global narcotics network where Chinese state-linked actors, Latin American cartels, and Western elites collude to launder drug profits—via encrypted auctions of cartel cash (e.g., fentanyl revenue) into legitimate trade—fueling China’s export of synthetic opioids in a “reverse Opium War.”

Im argues Beijing knowingly enables this system, leveraging offshore drug wealth as a financial reservoir, while Western complicity (through a combination of banks, lawyers and politicians) shields facilitators. His findings reveal a lethal fusion of crime, commerce, and state power, driving addiction and corruption at an industrial scale, with historical echoes of imperial drug empires but amplified by modern globalization.

The French Connection and the Birth of Modern Narco-Empires

Don Im’s discovery of classified French Connection files that describe a major heroin smuggling operation in the 1960s and early 1970s, reveal the roots of the opium trade in Cold War geopolitics. The pursuit of profits from narcotics is traced to colonial France and its administration of the opium trade in post-WWII French Indochina (now Vietnam). The files exposed how French intelligence, after losing Vietnam, shifted heroin production to Marseille, while U.S.-Soviet rivalry and regional power vacuums allowed Chinese triads and warlords in the Golden Triangle (of Thailand, Burma and Hong Kong) to dominate the trade—a system where historical colonial greed and political compromises birthed modern narco-empires, now amplified by synthetic drugs and state-corrupted networks.

Legacy Empires

Today, the descendants of Golden Triangle heroin empires collaborate with Latin American cartels to expand global drug networks. Canada is no exception and serves as an appealing target for such operations. These dynasties exploit lax Canadian immigration and money-laundering systems (e.g., Vancouver’s casinos and real estate) to operate with diplomatic cover, despite U.S. sanctions. For example, Steven Law (the son of notorious Burmese drug trafficker Lo Hsing Han, dubbed “the godfather of heroin” by U.S. officials) entered Canada using a false business identity during a 2014 Asian trade delegation that permitted him to mingle with politicians undetected.

Meanwhile, DEA documents and sources reveal that a sanctioned kingpin—reportedly linked to former Chinese leader Deng Xiaoping—covertly relocated to a Vancouver suburb in the early 2000s, where an industry insider alleges he engaged in discreet meetings with British Columbia casino officials while maintaining active ties to Chinese organized crime networks.

After the surrender in 1996 of the Burmese warlord Khun Sa—said to have controlled nearly 70 percent of the world’s heroin supply—groups like the United Wa State Army (with Chinese intelligence ties) filled the void, flooding markets with heroin and meth. Canada’s failure to curb these inflows underscores the country’s role as a hub for transnational crime, blending Cold War-era narco-empires with modern corruption and geopolitical maneuvering.

Beijing’s Western Beachhead: CCP Operations Through Vancouver into the U.S.

The CCP leverages Vancouver as a strategic beachhead to infiltrate the U.S., using drug trafficking, money laundering, and political influence operations. One of the biggest reveals of the U.S. investigation Project Sleeping Giant concerned triads laundering cartel proceeds through North American banks via Chinese students, while supplying precursor chemicals for synthetic drugs.

Vancouver’s role intensified after Hong Kong’s 1997 handover, which established the city as a funnel for illicit wealth into real estate and casinos. A classified report from the 1990s, authored by former Canadian immigration officer Brian McAdam, exposed CCP-Triad collusion to traffic migrants and drugs via corrupt Latin American governments. A 1995 U.S. State Department report corroborated McAdam’s findings, citing INS consultant Willard Meyers’ claim that Taiwanese triads had bribed Belize’s immigration minister to exploit the country as an aerial smuggling corridor for undocumented Chinese migrants entering the United States.

Im argues that China’s political ecosystem—a tangle of regional elites, state-tolerated business empires, and laundering operations under Belt and Road projects involving drug lords and power-seeking provincial leaders—directly enables the global narcotics market. U.S. intelligence, he asserts, reveals this framework as part of Beijing’s broader strategy to secure authoritarian control, project power abroad, and evade Western containment.

In Im’s analysis, this criminalized shadow economy aligns with the CCP’s strategic imperatives: safeguarding one-party rule, dominating key regions, and dismantling alliances perceived as threats—a modern iteration of Cold War-era power struggles.

Read the original version of this report at the publisher’s website here.