Halt All Lethal Trafficking of Fentanyl Act

Floor Speech

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Mr. CRENSHAW. Mr. Speaker, I rise today in strong support of the HALT Fentanyl Act because it is the most obvious thing in the world to be in support of.

Hundreds of thousands of Americans have lost their lives to fentanyl. Fentanyl is supposed to be used in the operating room and on the battlefield. It is not meant to be laced into street drugs and sold online to kids. Due to its street use, it has killed hundreds of thousands of Americans--75,000 deaths a year. It is the Nation's biggest mass poisoning in our history.

There is a supply-side element to that. It is the Mexican drug cartels.

It is also worth mentioning the counterarguments to this. Everyone says, well, if we schedule this as a schedule I drug, then we are going to go right back to the old days of the 1980s and 1990s of mass incarceration.

There is a really big problem with that argument, and it is this: This has been temporarily scheduled since 2018. I would love my colleagues who are making that claim to show me the data on how this has hurt minority communities over the last 7 years. You can't because it doesn't exist. It has been schedule I for 7 years.

We cannot let that expire because then we take away the tools that our prosecutors and law enforcement need to stop this deadly threat.

I hate to break it to everybody, but incentives matter, behaviors matter. You need higher penalties for dealing fentanyl, a heck of a lot higher than the mandatory minimums we are even talking about here, if we actually care about saving kids' lives.

Mr. Speaker, we should stop playing politics. Let's do what is right. I urge my colleagues to support this bill.

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