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Fentanyl’s Bad Enough. Unless Congress Acts, Drug Crisis Could Get Worse
U.S. Senator Marco Rubio (R-FL)
August 2, 2023
Xylazine was created as an animal sedative. It’s extremely powerful and completely unfit for humans, as evidenced by the fact that it rots users’ flesh. But when American drug traffickers discovered they could mix it with opioids to reduce production costs,…they introduced it to the streets….
Meanwhile, the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) warns that nitazene, a new class of synthetic opioid that can be 10 times stronger than fentanyl…, is also being mixed into the drug stream….
Federal policymakers must act quickly…. For Congress, step one is to pass the bipartisan Combating Illicit Xylazine Act, which would officially list xylazine as an illicit drug…[and] penalize the international xylazine trade to keep the sedative out of the country entirely.
Step two is to enact the same protections against nitazene, which the DEA has provisionally listed as an illicit drug since December 2021. We need to make that listing permanent.
Finally, targeting fentanyl “fillers” will not be enough unless we also target fentanyl itself….This means passing the bipartisan FEND Off Fentanyl Act, which would sanction the Latin American drug traffickers who bring fentanyl precursors across our borders, and the HALT Fentanyl Act, which would list fentanyl analogs as illicit drugs.
It also means passing my forthcoming legislation to list fentanyl precursors as illicit drugs and sanction Chinese institutions that facilitate illegal drug transactions through money laundering….
Cartels, gangs, and mobs are flooding our streets with poison. Hundreds of thousands of people are dying as a result. If we don’t try to protect them, we aren’t worthy of being called public servants.