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On October 17, 2017, the U.S. Department of Justice announced that federal grand juries in the Southern District of Mississippi and the District of North Dakota returned indictments, unsealed on October 16, 2017, against two Chinese nationals and their Northern American based traffickers and distributors for separate conspiracies to distribute large quantities of fentanyl and fentanyl analogues and other opiate substances in the United States. The DOJ has made the defendants the first manufacturers and distributors of fentanyl and other opiate substances to be designated as Consolidated Priority Organization Targets (CPOTs). CPOT designations are those who have “command and control” elements of the most prolific international drug trafficking and money laundering organizations.