NEW YORK — In a windowless hangar at New York's John F. Kennedy airport, dozens of law enforcement officers sift through packages, looking for fentanyl -- a drug that is killing Americans every day.
It's a laborious job, with more than 2 million items of mail, the vast majority of it innocuous, arriving at the postal sorting center from around the world every day.
"We're looking for the proverbial needle in the haystack," says a Customs and Border Protection (CBP) agent, standing amid piles of parcels and letters in the vast, fluorescent lamp-lit warehouse.
The US Postal Service facility has become one of multiple fronts in America's war on opioid addiction, which kills tens of thousands of people every year and ravages communities across the nation.
Sixty percent of all mail arriving in the United States from abroad comes through the center at JFK, and officers spend day and night checking suspicious looking packages for deadly narcotics.
They are mainly hunting for illegally made fentanyl, a synthetic opioid 50 times more potent than heroin and up to 100 times stronger than morphine -- but which is sometimes legally prescribed to ease pain.
According to US government data, about 32,000 Americans died from opioid overdoses in 2018. That accounts for 46 percent of all fatal overdoses.
The majority of fentanyl seized here, whether original or an "analog" product that has similar effects but a slightly different chemical formula, has been bought on the so-called "dark web," from sites usually based in China or Hong Kong.
HOME DELIVERY
Users, often looking for an ever more euphoric high, generally pay with cryptocurrencies, a simple credit card, or PayPal, according to Ray Donovan, the New York chief of the federal Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA).
"They don't need to leave their houses. They can order fentanyl directly from China and have it shipped to their doorstep," Donovan told AFP.
CBP agent and division chief Robert Redes has worked at JFK airport for more than 15 years.
Surrounded by thousands of letters and packages, he recalls when an innocent looking musical birthday card arrived from Toronto in March 2018.
Three grams of fentanyl -- enough to kill 1,500 people -- were hidden inside.
The discovery led to the arrest of a 34-year-old man in Pennsylvania who had bought the synthetic opioid online.
A search of his apartment unearthed a stash of Xanax, LSD, ecstasy, marijuana and hallucinogenic mushrooms.
Because officers are more suspicious of packages coming from China, traffickers often go through an intermediary based in a third country, explains Donovan, who led the capture of Joaquin "El Chapo" Guzman, the Mexican drug lord sentenced to life in jail in July.
It is impossible to check all the mail that arrives at JFK so with the help of trained sniffer dogs, and based on intelligence they have received, officers inspect about 1,000 packages considered high-risk every day.
LASER TECHNOLOGY
Suspicious parcels are X-rayed or examined using laser technology. Sometimes they are opened with a knife -- carefully, since inhaling just a few milligrams of fentanyl can prove fatal.
Fentanyl purchased on the internet is often extremely pure, says Redes. It is cut and then sold on the streets.
"We're dealing with rather small quantities," as opposed to seizures of heroin or cocaine, which are measured in kilograms, he says.
"But it doesn't take very much fentanyl to result in overdoses and even deaths."
A laser spectrometer is the officers' best weapon. It is connected to a database that can identify 450 types of narcotics without opening the package.
Traffickers frequently flood the market with new "analogs," however, meaning officers need to constantly update the digital drug library, says Redes.
Unlike private competitors such as FedEx or UPS, the US Postal Service has limited electronic tracking of mail. Only 40 percent of incoming correspondence is tracked, complicating the work of agents.
A federal law requiring 100 percent tracking of international packages will come into force by the end of next year.
The US government has even launched a competition offering $1.5 million in prize money to anyone who can invent technology that makes it easier to detect opiates in the mail.
"It may seem overwhelming. (But) it's technology that's really going to win the day," says Redes.
FAST AND CHEAP
For New York's special narcotics prosecutor Bridget Brennan -- who has seen cocaine, crack, heroin and now fentanyl ravage communities in her more than 20 years investigating the drug trade -- fentanyl is the "perfect product" for traffickers.
It takes about 4 months to turn poppies grown in Mexico's Sierra Madre range into refined heroin, Brennan says at her Chinatown office.
Compared to making heroin, manufacturing a kilogram of fentanyl in a laboratory requires less labor and is much faster, because Mexico's unpredictable weather is not a factor.
It also costs about 10 times less: anywhere between $5,000 and $10,000, says Brennan.
Fentanyl is so powerful that half a million pills can be made from just one kilo. They are then sold on the streets of the United States for $8-10 each.
According to the DEA, a kilo of fentanyl purchased in China for between $3,000 and $5,000 can generate revenue of more than $1.5 million in the United States.
Fentanyl, a powerful painkiller approved by the US Food and Drug Administration for a range of conditions, has been central to the American opioid crisis which began in the late 1990s.
The epidemic was sparked by doctors, encouraged by the pharmaceutical industry, overprescribing opioid pain medication oxycodone, sold by Purdue Pharma under the brand name OxyContin.
Drug overdoses are so frequent in part because users who purchase on the street don't know what they are buying, says Brennan.
"They are getting pills that say they are oxycodone but are fentanyl. Sometimes sellers don't know what they are selling," she told AFP.
PRINCE
Purdue -- owned by the Sacklers, one of America's richest families -- filed for bankruptcy last month in a settlement aimed at warding off thousands of state and federal lawsuits related to the opioid emergency.
Powerful opioids like oxycodone had been intended to be used for pain relief for serious illnesses such as cancer, because of how addictive they are.
Between 8 and 12 percent of patients are addicted by the end of the treatment, and many start to purchase black market opiates or illicit drugs such as heroin, according to the National Institute on Drug Abuse.
The danger was tragically illustrated in 2016 when music icon Prince died at age 57 after overdosing on the opioid hydrocodone, which had been mixed, apparently without his knowledge, with fentanyl.
The US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention have reported more than 400,000 deaths from opioid overdoses from 1999 to 2018, with an explosion in the death rate between 2013 and 2017.
MEXICO AND CHINA
China was the first country to manufacture illegal fentanyl for the US market, but the problem surged when trafficking through Mexico began around 2005, according to Donovan.
It was led by major cartels such as El Chapo's Sinaloa group that were seeking to make up for losses endured when Colombian traffickers began skipping Mexico to export cocaine to Europe, Australia, Russia and China on their own.
The Mexican cartels began to produce more poppies in an attempt to manufacture heroin as strong as that found in Colombia.
They failed though, so they started to import fentanyl from China and mix it with heroin to make it stronger and give it a competitive edge.
After El Chapo was first captured in Mexico in 2014, his sons and other traffickers started building more fentanyl labs and smuggling the drug to the US as their profits soared, says Donovan.
To reduce costs and evade Chinese laws, they then began to import only the chemical precursors of fentanyl, going on to make the finished product themselves in their clandestine labs.
President Donald Trump declared the opioid crisis a "public health emergency" in October 2017 and accused China of fueling it.
Against the backdrop of a trade war with Washington, Beijing changed its policy in May and designated all analogs of fentanyl as controlled substances.
But the list does not include many of the precursors needed to make it, allowing Mexican traffickers to fill the void, the DEA's chief for North and Central America, Matthew Donahue, told Congress in July.
He called the manufacture of fentanyl precursors by Mexican cartels themselves "an alarming development."
BORDER SEIZURES
Back at the postal center at JFK airport, seizures of fentanyl are down these days; authorities say most of it is entering the US at official border posts with Mexico.
Mixed with fillers, heroin, methamphetamines or cocaine, or in the form of small blue pills resembling OxyContin tablets, it is hidden in vehicles or trafficked by pedestrians crossing on foot.
CBP's executive director for cargo and conveyance security, Thomas Overacker, recently acknowledged that officers can only inspect about one percent of private vehicles and 16 percent of commercial trucks that enter the US from Mexico.
Seizures are soaring nationwide, however.
Last year, the CBP intercepted 985 kilos (2,170 pounds) of illegal fentanyl and its analogs, compared to less than one kilo in 2013.
When the fentanyl reaches New York, it is mostly distributed by Dominican crime syndicates, according to the DEA's Donovan.
They then hand over profits to Chinese money laundering gangs associated with the Mexican cartels, and which are increasingly present in Mexico, highlighting the global nature of drug trafficking networks.
US authorities have been fighting the drug trade for half a century, but in fentanyl, they are facing the deadliest drug yet.
As well as cracking down on traffickers, the government recognizes that it must also focus efforts elsewhere, such as treating addiction.
The National Institutes of Health has devoted almost $1 billion to tackle the opioid crisis.
"The fight against drug abuse is a generations-long struggle. It will not be completed overnight," Donahue told the congressional hearing.
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WASHINGTON - Three Chinese citizens have been charged with distributing fentanyl in the United States, where addiction spurred by the synthetic opioid drug has ravaged communities, US prosecutors announced Tuesday.
Deyao Chen, Guichun Chen and Liangtu Pan are accused of selling nearly 3,000 packages of controlled substances in the US and internationally between April 2016 and March 2017.
The drugs were sold on websites located in China and mailed to the United States, where they were distributed via the US Postal Service by a Pennsylvania former deputy sheriff named David Landis.
Drugs sold by the three defendants had been found in the systems of five people in the United States who overdosed and died, according to a Justice Department statement.
Deyao, Guichun and Liangtu, who share the alias "Alex," took online orders from China and then mailed the drugs to Landis for distribution.
The three Chinese nationals have not been arrested and are believed to be in China, a spokesman told AFP.
Landis has pleaded guilty and is awaiting sentencing, the statement read.
Their indictments come amid a quarrel between Washington and Beijing about fentanyl trafficking -- a substance 50 times stronger than heroine, which, along with other synthetic opioids, caused 32,000 US deaths in 2018.
President Donald Trump announced new tariffs on China over the summer as a response to what he saw as their failure to stem the flow of fentanyl into the US. The two countries have since pledged to work together to fight the proliferation of the drug.
"China is supplying the United States with the most potent and deadly fentanyl and other synthetic opioids on the market today," US Attorney William M. McSwain said in the statement.
"International suppliers beware: you cannot hide behind a computer or evade our detection by drug trafficking from a far-away place," he warned.
Beijing has rejected responsibility for the US addiction crisis.
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SHANGHAI - Chinese state media on Friday hit back at claims by US officials that China was failing to crack down on the flow of fentanyl and fentanyl-related substances into the United States, saying that responsibility for opioid abuse lay with users.
The United States was "pushing responsibility" for fentanyl abuse to China and ignoring that Beijing had implemented strict controls on the highly addictive synthetic opioid, reported The People's Daily newspaper, published by the ruling Communist Party.
US officials say China is the main source of illicit fentanyl and fentanyl-related substances that are trafficked into the United States, much of it through international mail. Beijing denies that most of the illicit fentanyl entering the United States originates in China.
"Some people in the United States need to understand, the source of the illness lies within one's body," the newspaper said in an article which bore the pen name "Zhong Sheng", usually used to express its views on foreign policy.
"You can't be rushed to see the doctor, and you can't just scold others once you're ill," it said, adding that the United States had not done enough to fight the epidemic of opioid abuse.
The US Treasury on Wednesday imposed sanctions on three Chinese men accused of illegally trafficking fentanyl. US President Donald Trump accused Beijing of reneging on pledges to stem a flood of the drug into the United States.
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President Donald Trump has repeatedly hit out at China for failing to curb the export of illegal fentanyl to the United States.
The powerful painkiller is the primary synthetic opioid available in the US, a class of drug that was responsible for almost 32,000 overdose deaths last year.
But why is fentanyl's threat growing, and can Beijing help America cure its addiction to its deadliest drug?
- What is fentanyl? -
Fentanyl was first developed in 1959 and introduced to the US market in the 1960s as an intravenous anesthetic.
A hundred times more potent than morphine, it is used to manage severe pain, for example among cancer patients or those receiving end-of-life care.
But it is also produced illegally and trafficked into the US -- primarily from China and Mexico -- in the form of powder or tablets, and sometimes gets mixed with heroin and cocaine.
- Why is it spreading? -
A report published in December by researchers at University of California San Francisco found that fentanyl use has surged in recent years because of heroin and prescription pill shortages, and because it was cheaper for drug wholesalers to produce than heroin.
"Very little drug slang has developed to describe fentanyl, which lends support to the notion that this is not a demand-driven epidemic," said Sarah Mars, a UCSF researcher.
Users are often unaware the products they are consuming contain the drug, and a key market is people who turn to counterfeit medicines for cost reasons.
"Traffickers are exploiting high consumer demand for illicit prescription painkillers, tranquilizers, and sedatives by producing inexpensive counterfeits containing fentanyl," said a report by the Drug Enforcement Agency (DEA).
In 2016, counterfeit prescription painkiller Norco, which actually contained fentanyl, was responsible for at least 14 deaths in California.
- How deadly is it? -
Fentanyl can be lethal in a dose of as little as two milligrams, equivalent to a few grains of sand.
But it is not just deadly to users and can threaten anyone who intercepts it such as postal workers, law enforcement officers, first responders and even sniffer dogs, according to the DEA.
In 2015, New Jersey law enforcement officers carrying out a narcotics field test on what turned out to be fentanyl experienced shortness of breath, dizziness and respiratory distress, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
- Where does it come from? -
Powdered fentanyl can be bought on the dark web or even business trading sites like Weiku.com, according to Roger Bate, a scholar at the American Enterprise Institute who published a report on the drug this week.
A kilo sourced from China can be purchased in the US for as little as $1700, which is then used to create up to a million pills that when sold for $10 to $20 each generate millions in revenue, according to the DEA.
Bate's report found that poorly policed free trade zones in places like Singapore and Dubai help bring the products into the US market.
Mexican gangs also play a large role in producing and distributing the drug, with precursor chemicals first smuggled into Mexico via the southwest US.
Some illicit fentanyl products are also brought into the US via Canada, which until 2017 did not allow authorities to open the contents of mail weighing less than 30 grams.
- Can China help? -
Trump issued his latest missive at China over its alleged inaction Thursday, tweeting: "My friend President Xi said that he would stop the sale of Fentanyl to the United States – this never happened, and many Americans continue to die!"
China has in fact already made some efforts to crack down on suppliers, leading to transshipment via Vietnam, said Bate, but it could apply much more pressure to major players in its chemical industry that would yield some results.
But he warned action by Beijing could be limited because the government may not be fully aware of the activities of the tens of thousands of smaller chemical producers operating throughout the country.
What's more, even if its efforts prove successful, other countries with manufacturing capacity like Russia or India could step in as new suppliers.
"It's quite difficult for a few guys in the garage to make, but not difficult for legitimate chemical plants to make," Bate said.
He advocates instead for measures to fund drug and mental health programs so that fewer people become addicted, and greater availability of the drug naloxone to treat those who have overdosed.
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WASHINGTON - China has pledged to stem a flood of the synthetic opioid fentanyl onto America's streets, where it kills thousands of people a month, but US security experts are skeptical about whether Beijing is willing, or even able, to follow through.
Ten current and former US officials, congressional sources and China and trade experts told Reuters in interviews that China cooperates only when it believes it will get something in return.
In this case, several said, Beijing appears to have offered its help so that it could get the best deal possible from Washington in trade negotiations.
"Will they enforce this, or is this just another gesture to be used to secure something they want?" said Robin Cleveland, vice chair of the congressional US-China Economic and Security Review Commission, which monitors the national security impact of bilateral trade and economic ties.
"I think they would hope to leverage it in some meaningful way in the context of trade talks," she said.
Those trade talks ran into trouble this week with China backtracking on earlier commitments to change its laws in key areas, including intellectual property rights, trade secrets, forced technology transfers, access to financial services and currency manipulation, Reuters reported on Wednesday, citing U.S. government and private-sector sources.
US President Donald Trump responded to China by vowing to raise tariffs on $200 billion worth of Chinese goods from 10 to 25 percent on Friday.
Unless resolved in a new round of negotiations, the mounting tensions over trade could derail China's cooperation on fentanyl.
"They are not going to do it, the record says, unless they get a trade deal, or we threaten them in the absence of a trade deal," said Derek Scissors, an expert on Sino-U.S. economic relations at the American Enterprise Institute think tank.
"They can stop this if they want, but they won't unless they see a deal."
An explosion in the use of fentanyl, an opioid painkiller 50 times more potent than heroin, and its analogues has driven the most devastating chapter of America's long-running opioid crisis, US law enforcement agencies say, and China accounts for most of the fentanyl and fentanyl analogues seized.
The United States recorded more than 28,000 synthetic opioid-related overdose deaths in 2017, according to the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the majority of them fentanyl-related.
Chinese President Xi Jinping promised Trump at a summit in Argentina in December that Beijing would crack down on flows of all fentanyl-related substances.
In April, China pledged that from May 1 it would expand the list of narcotics subject to state control to the more than 1,400 known fentanyl analogues, which have a slightly different chemical makeup but are all addictive and potentially deadly, as well as any new ones developed in the future.
Fentanyl and all of its analogues are controlled substances subject to strict regulation in the United States.
Speaking in Beijing on Friday, Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesman Geng Shuang said China had implemented the change as promised starting from May 1, a move he said had been positively appraised by the United States.
"I want to emphasize here that China keeps to its word," he told a daily news briefing. "At the same time, I would also like to point out that the root cause of the US fentanyl problem is not in China."
Asked whether there was a link between China's promised increased controls on fentanyl and trade talks with the United States, Geng said: "I don't know what person has such an imagination."
China's Ministry of Public Security, National Health Commission and National Medical Products Administration – the departments responsible for the new rules – did not respond to requests for comment on this story. The White House did not respond to requests for comment.
The regulatory change is supposed to shut down the operations of illicit producers and traffickers who advertise and sell fentanyl products on video websites including Google's YouTube and Vimeo, and on the Dark Web.
They deliver the drugs to the U.S. market mainly in the mail, through express delivery services or trans-shipping them through Mexico and Canada.
Trump hailed the agreement as a major advance in efforts to contain the opioid epidemic. Some US officials who work directly with Chinese law enforcement agencies say they believe Beijing is committed to clamping down.
"We see them as a partner we want to work with to effect that change of availability here in the US," said Daniel Baldwin, a senior Drug Enforcement Administration official who was its top representative in Beijing from 2011-2014.
The ruling Communist Party's newspaper, the China Daily, covered the plans to expand the controlled substances list last week under the headline, "China, US join hands to fight fentanyl."
But even Trump's attorney general, William Barr, has said it is too soon to claim victory.
"Whether the Chinese ... actually deliver on it from an enforcement standpoint remains to be seen," Barr testified at a House of Representatives budget hearing in April.
PAST FAILURES
Beijing has reneged on pacts with Washington before, US experts say.
In 2017, the bulk of fentanyl seizures by US Customs and Border Protection came from China, despite an agreement announced in September 2016 by the Obama administration on "enhanced measures" to fight trafficking to the United States. China later said it made no such agreement.
China added fentanyl, 24 analogues and two precursors to its narcotics control list beginning in 2015, leading to a sharp reduction in those products. But manufacturers sidestepped the controls by synthesizing new analogues, some of them even more potent and deadly than the original.
They will remain legal until China follows through on its promise to control all forms of fentanyl.
US law enforcement officials worry China will not be able to fully enforce this new crackdown either, even if it sticks to its promise to try.
Its oversight of more than an estimated 400,000 producers and distributors inside vast chemical and pharmaceutical industries is notoriously weak and enforcement agencies are short of inspectors and weakened by corruption, the U.S. experts said.
Fentanyl analogues are relatively easy to make and some producers create front companies to sell fentanyl to traffickers, US experts say.
Further, experts say, local Communist Party officials are under pressure to hit targets for economic growth and so are often reluctant to shut down any growing businesses, including pharmaceutical firms.
Chinese Customs enforcement appears to be even weaker. Officials stopped fewer than a half dozen fentanyl-related shipments in 2016-2017 before they could be shipped out of China, according to Democratic Senator Dianne Feinstein, a co-chair of the US Senate's Caucus on International Narcotics Control.
U.S. officials have found Chinese inaction frustrating.
"As sophisticated as China is in their intelligence services, I find it odd that they can't stem the flow of fentanyl from their country," Joshua Skule, the executive assistant director of the FBI's Intelligence Branch, told Reuters before Beijing announced it would control all fentanyl-related substances.
China has provided the United States with information that aided in federal indictments of eight Chinese nationals for fentanyl trafficking since 2017. All of the suspects remain at large in China, however, according to a US Congressional Research Service report in December 2018.
"There are many, many laws on Chinese books that don't get enforced. It will turn out that enforcement is quite spotty," Scissors said.
China's government is committed to making a difference on this case, however, says Daniel Baldwin, who served as the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration's top representative in Beijing for three years.
"We see them as a partner we want to work with to effect that change of availability here in the US," he said.
A bipartisan group of senators has introduced a bill to empower Trump to sanction Chinese drug makers and others who knowingly sell synthetic opioids to traffickers. It also would create a commission to monitor flows of the substances from overseas.
"We have to make sure they keep their word," said Republican Senator Tom Cotton, a co-sponsor of the legislation.
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CHICAGO - Nebraska on Tuesday carried out America's first execution using fentanyl -- the opioid at the center of the country's deadly overdose crisis -- as part of a previously-untested, four-drug combination.
Carey Dean Moore, sentenced to death for two 1979 murders, was the first prisoner executed in the Midwestern state in 21 years, in what was its first ever lethal injection.
The 60-year-old was pronounced dead at 10:47 am (1547 GMT). The execution lasted approximately 20 minutes, according to Scott Frakes, director of the Nebraska Department of Correctional Services.
Moore's execution survived a last-minute legal challenge from a drug company and protests about the new lethal injection protocol.
It was a pivotal test for Nebraska, where the state legislature abolished the death penalty in 2015, only to see voters reinstate it the next year in a referendum. The state last performed an execution in 1997 by electric chair.
"I recognize that today's execution impacts many people on many levels," said Frakes.
The execution was carried out with "professionalism, respect for the process and dignity for all involved," he said.
QUESTIONS ABOUT DRUGS USED
The lethal injection consisted of the sedative diazepam to bring on unconsciousness, the painkiller fentanyl citrate, the muscle relaxer cisatracurium to stop breathing, and potassium chloride to stop the heart.
Only potassium chloride has been used before in executions.
Robert Dunham, director of the Death Penalty Information Center, said the new procedure was an indication of the trouble states are having in acquiring death penalty drugs.
"It indicates that states are looking for drugs that are available," Dunham told AFP.
Pharmaceutical manufacturers and providers have been increasingly hostile to selling such drugs to states. Officials across the country have had to scramble to find the execution drugs they need or find alternatives.
Dunham said Nebraska's use of fentanyl was problematic, because use of the powerful opioid is closely controlled by law, and the state has not disclosed its source for the drug.
"The manner in which they obtained it is highly questionable," he said.
COURTS WEIGH IN
Last week, German drug maker Fresenius Kabi challenged Nebraska with regards to two other drugs in the protocol, claiming the company was the likely source of the substances, and if so, Nebraska improperly obtained them.
It demanded that the state disclose the source of its drugs.
But the state insisted the drugs were legally acquired and both a federal judge and an appellate court sided with Nebraska.
Even the pope himself was not able to change Moore's fate.
Two weeks ago, Pope Francis changed the Catholic Church's teaching, declaring the death penalty "inadmissible" in all cases.
Nebraska Governor Pete Ricketts, a Catholic who supported the reinstatement of the death penalty, was resolute.
"While I respect the pope's perspective, capital punishment remains the will of the people," Ricketts said.
A handful of demonstrators gathered during the rainy morning to protest the execution. A small group also gathered in the early evening in the state capital Lincoln to criticize the governor's decision.
"Ricketts would kill Jesus," one protester's sign read.
The American Civil Liberties union also criticized the governor, saying he had carried out an execution "shrouded in secrecy."
"The 38-year-long journey to this execution further proves what we've been saying all along: The ACLU believes the death penalty in America is a broken process from start to finish and should be abolished nationwide," the group said in a statement.
'I AM GUILTY'
Moore had been on death row for 38 years and did not want further delays of his execution.
In 1980, while still in his early 20s, he was sentenced to death for the killings the year prior of two Omaha taxi drivers five days apart.
Expressing contrition, he admitted to fatally shooting the first driver during a robbery committed with his brother, and killing the second driver to "foolishly" prove to himself that he could commit murder on his own.
In his final words, Moore alluded to a written statement dated August 2, in which he pointed to other Nebraska death row inmates who claim their innocence.
"I am guilty, they are not," he wrote. "Why must they remain there one day longer?"
Moore also asked forgiveness from his brother.
Moore's execution was the 16th in the United States this year, according to the Death Penalty Information Center.
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WASHINGTON - U.S. President Donald Trump will declare the nation's opioid crisis a public health emergency on Thursday in a bid to redirect federal resources and loosen regulations to combat widespread abuse, senior administration officials said.
Trump's planned announcement comes in response to an epidemic that has worsened in recent years and especially wreaked havoc in rural areas. But the move stops short of declaring a national emergency, which would have freed up additional federal funds to combat the epidemic.
Officials said the declaration would help fight abuse of prescription painkillers, heroin and fentanyl by expanding access to treatment, and curb delays in staffing the Department of Health and Human Services to help states grapple with the crisis.
"The declaration ... will really reorient all of the federal government and the executive branch's resources towards focusing on providing relief for this urgent need," one official told reporters on a conference call ahead of a speech by Trump on the issue at 2 p.m. ET (1800 GMT).
The United States is battling a surge in opioid-related deaths, including 33,000 in 2015, more than any year on record, according to federal data.
Opioids, primarily prescription painkillers, heroin and fentanyl - a drug 50 to 100 times more powerful than morphine - are fueling the drug overdoses. About 100 Americans die each day from related overdoses, Centers for Disease Control data shows.
The reach of the crisis has pressured Trump to act, but Thursday's move may still frustrate public health officials and others who had urged a quicker and more forceful response.
"We must instill a heightened sense of urgency in the White House," Democratic U.S. Representative Elijah Cummings wrote in an op-ed on Wednesday ahead of the announcement.
In July, members of a White House commission on the drug crisis had recommended that Trump declare a national emergency. One month later, the president said he would make an announcement on the opioid crisis, but later said more time was needed to coordinate the response.
That effort was further complicated earlier this month when Trump’s choice for White House adviser on drug policy, former congressman Tom Marino, withdrew from consideration.
On Wednesday, the president told Fox Business Network he would be declaring the crisis a national emergency, which would have opened up additional federal funds.
But officials told reporters on the conference call Thursday that those funds under the Federal Emergency Management Agency have been nearly exhausted after recent storms struck Puerto Rico, Texas and Florida.
The administration would have to work with Congress to help provide additional funding to address drug abuse, they added.
Thursday's declaration also allows the Department of Labor to issue grants to help dislocated workers affected by the crisis. HIV/AIDS health funding would also be prioritized for those who need substance abuse treatment, officials said.
Additional actions under the move would be announced in coming weeks by various agencies, they said.
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The U.S. Justice Department announced Tuesday the indictment of two Chinese producers of fentanyl, the synthetic opioid that causes a rising share of the country's 60,000-plus annual overdose deaths.
But questions remained over whether the Trump administration will go after the US makers and distributors of legal opioids that have fuelled the nation's addiction crisis.
Early Tuesday President Donald Trump's nominee to head the Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA), Congressman Tom Marino, withdrew after news reports tied him to legislation that protected prescription drug distributors from prosecution for indiscriminately dumping hundreds of millions of tablets of highly addictive opioids like Oxycodone into the U.S. market.
"Rep. Tom Marino has informed me that he is withdrawing his name from consideration as drug czar. Tom is a fine man and a great Congressman!" Trump tweeted.
Legal and illegal synthetic opioids were behind most of the 64,000 drug overdose deaths across the country in 2016, a record level expected to further rise this year.
US Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein said Tuesday that 20,000 of those deaths resulted from fentanyl that is cheap to manufacture and is up to 50 times more potent than heroin.
With the supply of prescription opioids on the market cut back in the past two years, addicts have turned to the cheapest alternative, fentanyl or heroin cut with fentanyl.
Two Chinese, Zhang Jian and Yan Xiaobing, were indicted for supplying two separate distribution networks with fentanyl, one of them also operating in Canada.
They said Yan operated at least two chemical plants in China able to produce fentanyl by the tonne. Yan could allegedly alter the chemical makeup of the fentanyl to evade U.S. laws, and had at least 100 distributors working for him.
US officials alleged Zhang had four fentanyl-producing laboratories and sold the drug over the Internet, paid for by crypto-currencies and shipped by international parcel services.
Zhang and Yan "represent one of the most significant drug threats facing the country -- overseas organized crime group capable of producing nearly any synthetic drug imaginable," said DEA Acting Administrator Robert Patterson.
US officials would not say if the two traffickers had been arrested or their plants shut by the Chinese authorities.
Tuesday's announcement came days after The Washington Post and 60 Minutes reported on how intensive lobbying in Congress by producers of prescription opioids and the support of a few legislators including Marino led to a 2016 law that weakened DEA efforts to crack down on them and prevent their drugs from hitting the streets.
Patterson insisted that the DEA has not let up on policing the industry and has the tools to do so, but would not say if the agency was investigating any of the major prescription opioid distributors.
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