A long-running legislative push to permanently put illicit fentanyl and its chemical cousins on the most restrictive list of U.S. drugs could reach President Trump’s desk before the end of March.
The Senate passed the HALT Fentanyl Act on Friday, 84-16, placing it in prime position to become law because the House passed similar legislation earlier this year.
All the “no” votes were from Democrats and Sen. Bernard Sanders, Vermont independent.
Fentanyl is a synthetic opioid that is fueling the U.S. drug overdose crisis. Yet Congress has struggled for years to pass legislation that would keep it on the Schedule I list of drugs that have no accepted medical use and a high potential for abuse.
Experts say permanent scheduling would result in efficient prosecutions and consistent penalties under guidelines from the U.S. Sentencing Commission while sending a signal to China and Mexico that America is serious about tackling the fentanyl problem as it pressures those nations to do more.
“This is an important change. It means tough penalties for fentanyl traffickers. It means certainty for law enforcement. This would get law enforcement tools they are asking for to get deadly drugs off our streets,” said Senate Majority Whip John Barrasso, Wyoming Republican. “This is strong, bipartisan legislation.”
Illicit fentanyl is made in clandestine labs and has an array of chemical analogs. It’s tough for U.S. laws to keep up with every form, so the HALT Fentanyl Act seeks to cover all of the illicit supply and make it easier for prosecutors to win cases.
Sponsors say the bill would not affect the legal use of fentanyl as a longstanding painkiller or impede research into the drugs.
Some Democrats are leery of permanent scheduling, saying the legislation could result in over-incarceration of drug offenders instead of attacking the root causes of drug addiction.
Yet the House easily passed the HALT Fentanyl Act on a bipartisan vote last month, giving the effort momentum.
The Senate passed its own version of the bill, so as a clerical matter, the House must pass it again before it reaches Mr. Trump. There is no meaningful difference between the House and Senate bills.
“I urge my House colleagues to swiftly pass the Senate version of this battle-tested, bipartisan bill to save lives, advance research and support our brave men and women in blue,” said Sen. Charles E. Grassley, an Iowa Republican and chief sponsor of the bill.
The president has signed only one bill this term, the Laken Riley Act, which requires officials to detain illegal immigrants charged or convicted of certain crimes.
Fentanyl started to flood the heroin supply in the middle of the past decade, resulting in an uptick in overdose deaths.
The powerful opioid has shown up in a variety of drugs and counterfeit pills since then, killing Americans of all ages and backgrounds and bedeviling the Obama, Trump and Biden administrations.
The drug still causes tens of thousands of American deaths per year.
Mexican cartels import precursor chemicals, often from China, and manufacture fentanyl. Traffickers press the drug into fake pills, causing unsuspecting Americans to take them and die.
Mr. Trump imposed a 25% tariff on Canada and Mexico last week, saying they haven’t done enough to crack down on illegal immigration and drug trafficking, though he did issue some exemptions.
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reports provisional data on overdose deaths each month, though the figures lag by nearly half a year.
The rate of U.S. overdose deaths steadily climbed during the COVID-19 pandemic that spanned the last year of the Trump administration and the first years of President Biden’s term — often topping 100,000 on an annual basis — before turning sharply downward in 2024.
Roughly 82,000 people died from U.S. overdoses during the 12 months that ended in October, the most recent yearlong data available.
