Congressman Joyce Fighting Flow of Fentanyl

By Contributing Writer on April 28, 2021

LFC comments: From Congressman Joyce’s newsletter –

Fighting to Stop the Flow of Fentanyl Flowing into Our Country

Nowhere has partisanship prevented progress more than when it comes to immigration and securing our southern border. Lawmakers must stop making immigration decisions based on political calculations and start working together to increase border security, stop the influx of fatal drugs, and end the humanitarian disaster at our southern border.

This past week, the U.S. Customs and Border Patrol announced that their agents seized 639 pounds of the deadly synthetic opioid at our southern border in March alone – a 233% increase in seizures from the same time last year. Below is a photo of how much fentanyl it takes to kill someone. As you can imagine, 639 pounds of that synthetic opioid is enough to kill more than 100 million people.

If that’s not a security and public health crisis, I don’t know what is. And it will have serious, deadly consequences if the White House and Congress don’t get their acts together and address it.

While Congress has yet to take up legislation that would address the crisis at our southern border, this week we did vote on a bill to extend the Drug Enforcement Agency’s temporary order to keep fentanyl and fentanyl analogues designated as Schedule I drugs.

The number of deaths from fentanyl-related substances is unknown, but the CDC reports that there were more than 50,000 deaths involving all synthetic opioids in the 12-month period ending July 2020.

Extending the scheduling of all fentanyl analogues as Schedule 1 will help prevent synthetic opioids from flooding into our communities by ensuring traffickers, both international and domestic, are held accountable without delay.