The U.S. Congress passed a bill Thursday that would strengthen criminal penalties for trafficking fentanyl, an opioid that has caused hundreds of thousands of overdose deaths in the United States in recent years.
The "HALT Fentanyl Act," named after this powerful synthetic opioid, passed the House of Representatives with 321 votes in favor, including about 100 members of the Democratic minority, and 104 votes against. Having already passed the Senate, the bill must now land on Donald Trump's desk for enactment.
The new law provides for a minimum sentence of 10 years in prison for any trafficking of more than 100 grams of fentanyl or an "analogous substance."
In 2024, 80,391 people died from overdoses in the United States, a drop of 271% from the 110,035 deaths recorded the previous year, and the lowest figure since 2019.
The number of fentanyl-related deaths has also plummeted, from about 76,000 in 2023 to 48,422 last year.
Republican Senate Majority Leader John Thune noted Thursday that "more Americans die from drug overdoses each year than the number of Americans who died in the entire Vietnam War."
Despite the relative consensus in Congress between Republicans and Democrats on the "HALT Fentanyl Act," several associations have expressed their opposition to the text.
According to the Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights, "instead of truly addressing the overdose crisis, this bill will simply repeat the mistakes of the war on drugs," waged by the United States since the presidency of Richard Nixon in the early 1970s.
With minimum sentences, "judges are prevented from modulating the punishment of an accused by taking into account the individual's past," the association added in a press release on Thursday.
The opioid crisis has its roots in the 1990s when drug manufacturers flooded the market with prescription painkillers such as OxyContin.
The current wave is fueled by fentanyl, a painkiller also prescribed by doctors that is now being diverted. The vast majority of fentanyl circulating in the United States is illicitly manufactured in China and smuggled in via Mexico.
More than a million Americans have died from overdoses in the past 20 years.