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Floor Speech
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Mr. THUNE. Mr. President, later today our friends in the House will be voting on the HALT Fentanyl Act. This is important legislation, and I am glad that it will soon be on its way to the President's desk.
I don't need to tell anybody about the terrible impact of drug overdoses in this country--many of them caused by fentanyl. More Americans die of drug overdoses each year than the number of Americans who died in the entirety of the Vietnam war.
Just 3 years ago, the New England Journal of Medicine estimated we were losing 22 teenagers every week to drug overdoses. Twenty-two teenagers every week, that is like losing an entire high school classroom week after week, and no part of this country has been spared from the influx of fentanyl.
We certainly have seen it in my home State of South Dakota. Enough fentanyl was seized in Sioux Falls, SD, last year to kill 2.5 million people.
Law enforcement reports that the cartels have a presence in our area, and the price of a single pill has dropped from $40 a few years ago to just $5 per pill today, largely due to the growing supply.
As bad as this situation is today, it was much worse a few years ago. Before 2018, the fentanyl analogs that were killing so many Americans were generally classified as schedule II substances, meaning regulations were less stringent and violations carried lighter penalties.
And if a particular analog was moved to schedule I, the cartels would simply alter the chemical composition slightly, which meant the new analog wasn't subject to stricter enforcement even though it was no less deadly, but that ended in 2018 when the Trump administration temporarily reclassified all fentanyl analogs under schedule I. And Congress has extended that temporary reclassification several times because it works.
Now it is time to make that permanent. That is where the HALT Fentanyl Act comes in. It will permanently classify fentanyl analogs as what we know them to be: the deadliest kind of drugs. And it will ensure that law enforcement has an important tool to go after the people bringing this poison into our country and peddling it in our communities.
I want to thank Senators Cassidy and Johnson and Chairman Grassley for their leadership on this issue and for getting this bill to this point. I expect today's vote in the House will be broadly bipartisan, as it was in the Senate, and it will soon be signed into law by President Trump--all made possible by their efforts.
The HALT Fentanyl Act has drawn support from law enforcement officers and State attorneys general, and perhaps, most significantly, it has the support of families of numerous Americans who have died from fentanyl overdoses. And I am grateful to those families for their passionate advocacy on this issue and on passage of this bill.
The HALT Fentanyl Act is just one step in the fight against the scourge of fentanyl. In the coming weeks, we will be taking up legislation to address another aspect of the fight, securing our borders. Much of the fentanyl in our country comes across an international border so securing our borders is a key step to preventing shipments of this poison from getting into our country in the first place, and the bill we will be voting on in the coming weeks will make a generational investment in border security, including finishing the border wall and investing in personnel and technology to stop illegal aliens and illegal drugs from getting across.
Too many Americans have lost their lives to drug overdoses. And so many of those deaths were caused by a single pill containing a lethal dose of fentanyl. Republicans will continue our efforts to end this crisis and prevent illegal drugs from getting into our country and devastating our communities.
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