[Congressional Record Volume 171, Number 49 (Friday, March 14, 2025)]
[Senate]
[Page S1757]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]



                           HALT Fentanyl Act

  Mr. LANKFORD. Mr. President, we are in the tenth week of the first 10 
weeks, obviously, of this Senate's session. It has been exceptionally 
productive during this time period.
  We have not only moved more nominees into confirmation for President 
Trump than any Senate has done in more than two decades, we have passed 
bills like the Laken Riley Act, which will absolutely help us in trying 
to remove criminal aliens out of the country.
  We have rolled back a lot of Biden's last-minute regulations that he 
literally threw in in the final hours that did not have the oversight, 
did not have the appearance. And they, obviously, didn't do it in the 
first 3\1/2\ years of their term. They stalled it till the very end on 
that for a reason: because it was unpopular with the American people.
  Those have been rolled back, many of them, and we still have several 
to go.
  Today we are finishing up a bill called HALT Fentanyl. The fentanyl 
epidemic is raging in our country.
  If you go back to just 2019 and compare that to 2023, in that short 
period of time, in my State of Oklahoma in 2019, we had 50 people who 
died of fentanyl. Fast-forward 4 years to 2023, the last year that we 
have complete records on; that is actually 730 people died. In 2023, 
across the country, we had 74,000 Americans who died from fentanyl 
overdose.
  Again, go back to 2019. Only about 10 percent of the opioid deaths in 
my State had fentanyl connected to it. Fast forward to 2023, 90 percent 
of the opioid-related deaths were connected to fentanyl.
  What the Mexican cartels are doing and what Chinese precursor 
chemicals coming into the country are causing is the death of fellow 
citizens, as they slip it into different fake pills, as they slip it 
into methamphetamine, as they slip fentanyl into cocaine, as they slip 
it into different places, to have someone who is using a drug or 
someone who never intended to use that drug to take their life. It has 
to stop.
  Even worse, the cartels not only know what they are doing, but they 
are trying to find specific ways to be able to avoid our laws. Fentanyl 
has a very specific definition in science of exactly what makes up 
fentanyl. And so what the cartels are doing is they are changing that 
chemical makeup ever so slightly in what they call an analog, and so it 
is really not ``fentanyl'' as a definition--meaning law enforcement, 
when they see it on the street, it has the same effect: It still kills 
you, but it is, actually, technically, not fentanyl, so you can't be 
prosecuted for it.
  This bill that we are bringing to the floor today opens up the 
fentanyl definitions to deal with fentanyl and the analogs of fentanyl 
so that the cartels can't continue to bring these deadly drugs into our 
country to take the lives and increase addiction in America and get 
away with it. This puts it in the hands of law enforcement, where they 
have been disarmed in that area, enforcement priorities, so they can 
actually enforce the law on these cartels and on the drug dealers and 
so we can identify it for what it really is. It is a killer drug.
  The HALT Fentanyl Act is incredibly important. And I am fully aware 
that in a week where our country is talking about: Are we going to have 
another government shutdown, it is going to slip through and people 
aren't even going to notice it. But law enforcement will notice it, and 
families in the future will notice it.
  The folks aren't dealing with the same addiction, as we are putting 
one more piece out there to be able to take this off.