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Floor Speech

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Mr. BOOKER. Mr. President, the Senator from Louisiana is a friend and someone who is, as he said, angry about these issues. That passion is real. His anger, his frustration, his determination is something that I share. In fact, I think this is one of the issues that, if you polled 100 Senators, you would see 100 Senators who sincerely and urgently believe we need to do something with this crisis that the Senator from Louisiana has so patently and clearly and candidly put forward. The fentanyl crisis is killing Americans at outrageous rates. Doing nothing or continuing to do the same thing is absolutely unacceptable.

So my colleague, his passion--Louisianians should know that this is one of the best fighters when it comes to protecting people in his State, and his passion for protection affects people all over this country.

But this is the challenge I have. We have now seen generations of the so-called War on Drugs, and the solutions that we seem to come up with are about more and more and more incarceration, longer and longer and longer sentences. And if that would solve the problem, count me in for continuing to go down that pathway.

We now incarcerate more people than any country on the planet Earth. One out of every three incarcerated women on the planet Earth is here in America. One out of every four incarcerated people in the world is here in America. But has that stopped the crisis of drugs in our communities, kids dying of fentanyl, of opioids? No. There is no correlation. Not one study--nothing--shows that higher and higher rates, higher and higher sentencing relate in any way to safer communities, and I have looked for that data.

The Department of Justice itself--the folks who are prosecuting people for drugs--their own report from the National Institute of Justice says more severe punishments do not chasten individuals convicted of these crimes. It has no correlation at all.

And yet, as my colleagues pointed out, every 7 seconds someone is dying. And so the question is this: What will make the difference?

My colleague, if you follow the evidence that you so passionately talked about on this day--National Fentanyl Awareness Day--the things that we know are actually driving down the deaths are treating this issue like a national health crisis.

Yes, we need law enforcement. Yes, we need to stop this fentanyl coming into our country. Yes, the law enforcement needs all the tools. I support them. I will fight for them. I will continue to invest in them.

But what is lacking to save lives is the kind of healthcare access that we need. Drug treatment, awareness, public health interventions-- we know those work, but yet we don't have the resources in communities to do them.

I bring your attention to some of the facts. The National Institutes of Health reports that 85 percent of our prison population right now-- think about that. The overwhelming majority of our prison population right now has an active substance use disorder of people incarcerated involving drug use. That is who we are incarcerating in America right now, folks coming in and out, getting further and further engaged in that dark world of drug abuse and drug sales; but we are not solving the problem.

Let me bring attention to the fact that, when it comes to sentencing, my colleague was talking about the mandatory minimums. But do you know what? If you get caught with possession--I know this--you get tagged with possession with intent to distribute. God, if you are in a school zone, you get tagged with something else.

We have prosecutors now that could stack up 20, 30, 40, 50 years, even more so. I don't know if folks know this, but on your first offense, possession with intent to distribute has a 5-year mandatory minimum, but you could be given up to 40 years. In the second offense in the United States of America, you could get a life sentence. The mandatory minimum is 10 years to life.

Is that stopping the crisis in our country? Do we need to bring in the death penalty? Is that going to stop what is happening in every 7 seconds?

Thirty years I have lived in Newark--25 years to be exact--and God, I have watched the drug war and what it has done: more mandatory minimums, more incarceration, and lives that continue to be destroyed by the horrors of drugs. I beg this body to look at the evidence of what actually saves lives.

Did you know that the No. 1 reason why people don't call for help when someone is having a drug overdose is because they are afraid of the consequences when they engage with the police? People are dying right now because people are afraid of the police because we are treating this like just a law enforcement problem and not a public health problem.

I will join with any colleague on either side of the aisle to stop the scourge of fentanyl taking too many of our children, but, God, follow the evidence, and let's work together on what we see is actually lowering causes, lowering the rates of death.

I will work with him. We have worked together before. Let's do something that is a comprehensive approach, that follows the data, that follows the report, that follows the National Institutes of Health and the DOJ's best recommendations.

I will join with him, and we will bring to the floor a comprehensive bill that does affect the fentanyl coming into our country, overwhelmingly being brought by Americans; that does affect law enforcement's capabilities and powers to detect those substances, as I found out on the border; that does impact the addicts that he so passionately and compassionately cares about. Let's do a comprehensive bill, not something that the data does not support will actually stop children from dying like they have died in the many seconds that I have talked.
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