Fentanyl

Floor Speech

BREAK IN TRANSCRIPT

Mr. McCONNELL. Mr. President, as I noted here on the floor last week, the unaccompanied children packed into overflowing facilities are not the only tragic consequence of our failure to secure the border.

In addition to the U.S. mail, our southern border is a major source for the stream of lethal illegal drugs that continue to pour into our country. According to the CDC, more Americans died of overdoses last year than ever before.

This health crisis predated COVID-19 and will outlast it, and Customs and Border Protection data tell us a major cause has been a spike in the flow of fentanyl and its analogs produced by chemical companies in places like China. These drugs, which can be hundreds of thousands of times stronger than morphine, are rightly classified on the schedule of controlled substances. There are severe penalties for those caught trafficking them. It is the least we can do to protect American lives, families, and communities.

Clearly, on its own, this step hasn't been sufficient, but in a few weeks, even this obvious step is set to expire. Fentanyl analogs would cease being controlled substances in Federal law, making enforcement and deterrence even more difficult.

So Congress is faced with what should be a crystal-clear choice. The right thing to do, of course, is to permanently schedule these substances. Only in Washington could this become some kind of intense debate, but alas, some soft-on-crime corners of the political left have convinced some Democrats that this impending expiration is actually, actually a political opportunity. They want the Democrats to only reschedule these analogs for a short period of time, punting this deadline just a few months into the future, which makes you ask, Why?

Well, so that Democrats could come back to the table with an unrelated soft-on-crime bill--say, reducing prison sentences for drug dealers--and make that bad idea the price of admission for keeping these deadly poisons illegal.

So look, we need to be clear-eyed here. No amount of political spin or inside-the-beltway horse trading can muddy the debate. It is very clear: Congress should schedule these fentanyl analogs permanently-- permanently.

It is not complicated. Americans are dying. Communities are drowning. Chinese drug traffickers are getting rich off of our misery. Permanently scheduling these analogs is the very least, the very least Congress can do

BREAK IN TRANSCRIPT

Source