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Floor Speech

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Mr. LANKFORD. Mr. President, we are in the tenth week of the first 10 weeks, obviously, of this Senate's session. It has been exceptionally productive during this time period.

We have not only moved more nominees into confirmation for President Trump than any Senate has done in more than two decades, we have passed bills like the Laken Riley Act, which will absolutely help us in trying to remove criminal aliens out of the country.

We have rolled back a lot of Biden's last-minute regulations that he literally threw in in the final hours that did not have the oversight, did not have the appearance. And they, obviously, didn't do it in the first 3\1/2\ years of their term. They stalled it till the very end on that for a reason: because it was unpopular with the American people.

Those have been rolled back, many of them, and we still have several to go.

Today we are finishing up a bill called HALT Fentanyl. The fentanyl epidemic is raging in our country.

If you go back to just 2019 and compare that to 2023, in that short period of time, in my State of Oklahoma in 2019, we had 50 people who died of fentanyl. Fast-forward 4 years to 2023, the last year that we have complete records on; that is actually 730 people died. In 2023, across the country, we had 74,000 Americans who died from fentanyl overdose.

Again, go back to 2019. Only about 10 percent of the opioid deaths in my State had fentanyl connected to it. Fast forward to 2023, 90 percent of the opioid-related deaths were connected to fentanyl.

What the Mexican cartels are doing and what Chinese precursor chemicals coming into the country are causing is the death of fellow citizens, as they slip it into different fake pills, as they slip it into methamphetamine, as they slip fentanyl into cocaine, as they slip it into different places, to have someone who is using a drug or someone who never intended to use that drug to take their life. It has to stop.

Even worse, the cartels not only know what they are doing, but they are trying to find specific ways to be able to avoid our laws. Fentanyl has a very specific definition in science of exactly what makes up fentanyl. And so what the cartels are doing is they are changing that chemical makeup ever so slightly in what they call an analog, and so it is really not ``fentanyl'' as a definition--meaning law enforcement, when they see it on the street, it has the same effect: It still kills you, but it is, actually, technically, not fentanyl, so you can't be prosecuted for it.

This bill that we are bringing to the floor today opens up the fentanyl definitions to deal with fentanyl and the analogs of fentanyl so that the cartels can't continue to bring these deadly drugs into our country to take the lives and increase addiction in America and get away with it. This puts it in the hands of law enforcement, where they have been disarmed in that area, enforcement priorities, so they can actually enforce the law on these cartels and on the drug dealers and so we can identify it for what it really is. It is a killer drug.

The HALT Fentanyl Act is incredibly important. And I am fully aware that in a week where our country is talking about: Are we going to have another government shutdown, it is going to slip through and people aren't even going to notice it. But law enforcement will notice it, and families in the future will notice it.

The folks aren't dealing with the same addiction, as we are putting one more piece out there to be able to take this off.

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