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Floor Speech

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Mr. LANKFORD. Mr. President, I do appreciate so much my colleagues coming to the floor just to be able to talk about the scourge of fentanyl and what it is really doing in our communities. Senator Ricketts, Senator Moody, Senator Budd, and Senator Hoeven spent a lot of time laying out the challenges we really face.

I think most Americans know it and have seen it, and they just don't realize how fast it is really moving. Ten years ago, we had 700 deaths in the country due to fentanyl. Last year, we had 87,000. That is the acceleration we have seen in a decade.

A vast majority of fentanyl used to come across the border from, quite frankly, China. It was being mailed in. Active work was done to be able to shut that down. It started to come through Mexico--that is progressively. We are taking that on. The cartels and the criminal organizations are shifting more and more to Canada to be able to find ways to be able to move it in. The Canadians have seen that and they have noted that as well by the aggressive actions they have taken.

Just to give you a quick glance at this, dealing with just the fentanyl issue, in 2020, the Canadians interdicted 1,000 pounds of fentanyl precursors; in 2021, it was 11,000 pounds. That is the acceleration that is also happening for these criminal organizations that are trying to be able to move fentanyl into our country and, quite frankly, into Canada as well.

So we are grateful for their partnership, but we definitely see this as an emergency. A decade ago, the United States did not move fast enough to be able to stop the movement of fentanyl into our country. We lost tens of thousands of Americans. President Trump is determined, and, quite frankly, this Congress is determined. We are not going to be asleep on that again. We will take it very, very seriously. It is a very big emergency.

So I thank my colleagues for coming here to be able to talk about it today.

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