Methamphetamine Response Act of 2021

Floor Speech

Mr. Speaker, I rise in support of S. 854, the Methamphetamine Response Act. The companion version of this bill, H.R. 2051, was led by Representatives Peters, Curtis, and Harshbarger in the House.

Methamphetamine is a highly addictive stimulant that is illicitly trafficked throughout the United States. This dangerous substance is associated with psychosis, cardiovascular dysfunction, infectious disease transmission, and overdose. The Drug Enforcement Administration even issued a public safety alert for the first time in 6 years in September 2021 warning Americans about the increase in the lethality of fake prescription pills containing fentanyl and methamphetamine.

In response to recent trends and alarming increases in methamphetamine-involved overdose deaths, S. 854 would designate methamphetamine as an emerging drug threat and would direct the Office of National Drug Control Policy to develop a methamphetamine response plan. The development and the implementation of this plan will help coordinate efforts across the Federal Government to more effectively address this emerging drug threat.

I will say, we absolutely have to have this in place, but it stops at the source. I was able in early January to go to the border, and I was outside of El Paso--actually in New Mexico, but outside of El Paso. The Border Patrol agents took me to the point where, on January 20, 2021, they ceased building the wall; and they said this is where a lot of the drugs are flowing through, and they were talking about meth, and they were also talking about fentanyl.

Fentanyl, as we know, mostly originates in China, but it comes through Mexico, so it is just a failure of so many different policies. It comes through Mexico and comes across the border. They said because of the volume of people coming up through the border without the remain in Mexico policy and the wall that it is numbers. If hundreds of people are coming, and we can catch 20 percent of them; and you can put fentanyl--I know we are talking about methamphetamine, but it comes together--you can put fentanyl in a water bottle and bring it through.

We are doing this bill today, which is great, but if the CR expires on March 11, illicit fentanyl and fentanyl analogues will be street- legal in the United States. This committee needs to bring the HALT Fentanyl Act to the floor and permanently ban illicit fentanyl. Seventy percent of all overdose deaths in Kentucky in 2020 were from illicit fentanyl.

Mr. Speaker, I rise in support of this bill. This is a serious bill. I actually had a sheriff from Nelson County, Kentucky, who was visiting, and he said: We can tell the price--because they do the controlled buys--in the amount of money I have to use to buy meth, the cost, I can tell you what has happened at the border because if it is low, it means we are flooded with it because the border is not in control, and right now the price is so low, the only thing that my drug enforcement officers have said to me is that, well, there is no longer any meth labs or many meth labs, if any, in rural Kentucky because so much is coming from Mexico it has put them out of business. So they don't have to go clean up meth labs as they find them, but it is a tough consolation.

We need to pass this bill, and we also need to pass the HALT Fentanyl Act. We need to get control of our southern border to keep these drugs from flowing into the country illegally to begin with.

Mr. Speaker, I have no additional speakers, and I yield back the balance of my time.

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