Senate passes bill that would increase penalties for fentanyl traffickers

WASHINGTON — The Senate on Friday passed a bill that would result in more prison sentences for fentanyl traffickers as both Republicans and Democrats seek to show they can act to rein in distribution of the deadly drug. Thune said this week the legislation “gives law enforcement a critical tool to go after the criminals bringing this poison into our country and selling it on our streets.” Called the HALT Fentanyl Act, the bill would permanently place all copycat versions of fentanyl — alterations of the drug that are often sold by traffickers — on the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration’s list of most dangerous drugs, known as Schedule 1. The legislation A similar version of the bill passed the House last month with 98 Democrats and every Republican except Rep. Thomas Massie of Kentucky in support. “This is bipartisan because, frankly, fentanyl is a bipartisan problem,” said Sen. Bill Cassidy, the Louisiana Republican who has Both Democrats and Republicans in Congress have found agreement on trying to halt the flow of fentanyl into the United States, where it is blamed for tens of thousands of overdose deaths every year. But some progressive Democrats said the bill was missing an opportunity to tackle root causes of addiction or to focus on stopping the drug from entering the U.S. Sen. Ed Markey, a Massachusetts Democrat, said in a statement that support for the bill was “enabling a political stunt at the expense of real solutions.” The bill will “do little to actually solve the fentanyl crisis but will make it harder to research addiction and overdose reversal medication, disrupt communities and families by incarcerating rather than treating addiction, and divert resources from methods that work to disrupt the flow of fentanyl in the United States to strategies from the outdated War-on-Drugs solutions that do not work,” Markey added.