The Biden-Backed HALT Fentanyl Act Would Impose Mandatory Minimums


When he ran for president in 2020, Joe Biden repudiated his lengthy historical past of pushing harsh penalties for nonviolent drug offenses, calling for the abolition of necessary minimal sentences. “Biden helps an finish to necessary minimums,” his marketing campaign mentioned. “As president, he’ll work for the passage of laws to repeal necessary minimums on the federal stage.” However by endorsing a invoice geared toward cracking down on fentanyl analogs, Biden is doing precisely the other.

The HALT Fentanyl Act, which the Republican-controlled Home of Representatives permitted at the moment by a bipartisan 289–133 vote, would completely add “fentanyl-related substances” (FRS) to Schedule I of the Managed Substances Act, essentially the most restrictive class. It defines an FRS as “any substance that’s structurally associated to fentanyl” and options one in all 5 chemical alterations.

Beneath the invoice’s amendments, anybody caught with specified quantities of an FRS (apart from federally permitted researchers) can be topic to necessary minimal sentences: 5 years for 10 grams or extra of “a mix or substance containing a detectable quantity” of an FRS and 10 years for 100 grams or extra. If “demise or severe bodily harm outcomes from using such substance,” the necessary minimal rises to twenty years.

In a “assertion of administration coverage” on Monday, the White Home referred to as the HALT Fentanyl Act’s provisions “essential elements of the Biden-Harris Administration’s 2021 suggestions to Congress to fight the provision of illicit FRS and save lives.” It urged Congress to approve “these essential measures,” which it mentioned would “enhance public security and save lives.”

Twenty-one legal justice reform organizations responded the following day with a letter to Biden that famous the invoice’s “entrenchment and enlargement of necessary minimums.” They added:

You campaigned on a coverage of ending necessary minimums, however the HALT Fentanyl Act does the other. Punishing FRS by way of necessary minimums is especially egregious. It’s because FRS are outlined solely based mostly on their molecular construction and with out regard to their pharmacological impact. What this implies is that, below the HALT Fentanyl Act, an individual may very well be topic to harsh necessary minimums for distributing innocent substances and even substances that reverse the results of fentanyl overdose—simply as long as these substances exhibit a selected molecular construction. Enacting a scheme that imposes necessary 5- or 10-year sentences on folks with out regard as to whether the substance they visitors is innocent and even useful is, to say the least, inconsistent with the promise to finish necessary minimal sentencing.

Maritza Perez Medina, director of the Workplace of Federal Affairs on the Drug Coverage Alliance, one of many teams that signed the letter, reiterated that criticism at the moment. “The Home appears intent on doubling down on the identical failed methods that received us right here,” she mentioned, urging the Democrat-controlled Senate to reject the HALT Fentanyl Act. “Whereas it might appear politically expedient to crack down on fentanyl and its analogues, historical past has proven us…this solely creates additional hurt. Rising legal penalties and increasing using necessary minimums, as this invoice does, has by no means lowered the provision or demand of illicit medication. As a substitute, it solely exacerbates racial disparities within the legal authorized system and creates the circumstances for an much more unknown, and stronger, drug provide to flourish.”

Laura Pitter, deputy director of the U.S. program at Human Rights Watch, concurred. “It is unhappy to see lawmakers revert to over-criminalization as soon as once more when now we have 50 years of proof that the battle on medication has been an abject failure,” she mentioned. “A vote for this invoice was a vote towards proof and science. We all know that harsher legal penalties have carried out nothing to handle the overdose disaster, which has solely gotten exponentially worse since Congress [temporarily scheduled fentanyl-related substances]. This is able to make that coverage everlasting and never solely entrenches necessary minimums however broaden them. It can additionally undermine efforts by scientists to seek out options for problematic substance use and discourage individuals who [use] medication who need assist from in search of it as a result of they may face harsh penalties.”

The Sentencing Undertaking’s Liz Komar echoed that evaluation. “By passing this invoice, the Home has signaled that Congress is coming into a brand new carceral period,” she mentioned in an emailed assertion. “The federal jail inhabitants has been on the rise because the starting of the Biden administration after seven years of decline. The passage of the HALT Fentanyl Act would deepen that development by doubling down on failed drug insurance policies that prioritize prisons over drug therapy and overwhelmingly hurt Black and Brown communities.”

Komar reminded legislators that the punitive method exemplified by Biden’s Senate profession as a hardline drug warrior has by no means been efficient at lowering drug-related deaths. “If necessary minimums and harsh sentences made communities safer, the overdose disaster wouldn’t have occurred,” she mentioned. “We urge the Senate to reject this invoice and all expansions of necessary minimums and reverse this punitive development.”

Rep. Frank Pallone Jr. (D–N.J.) voiced comparable considerations. “This battle on medication—necessary sentencing, incarcerate everyone—has not labored,” he noticed. “It did not work on different medication.” That didn’t cease 74 of Pallone’s fellow Democrats from voting for the HALT Fentanyl Act.

Rep. Thomas Massie (R–Ky.), the lone Republican to vote towards the invoice, joined the refrain of criticism. “As a substitute of passing payments that broaden the failed Battle on Medicine, we ought to be specializing in regaining operational management of the border,” he wrote on Twitter. “One-size-fits-all necessary minimal sentences are unwise, and this invoice will increase the variety of defendants topic to them.”

The “failed Battle on Medicine” has succeeded in a single essential respect: It has made drug use deadlier. The financial incentives created by prohibition and the stress utilized by makes an attempt to implement it gave us heroin as an alternative of opium, fentanyl as an alternative of heroin, extremely variable black-market opioids as an alternative of reliably dosed prescription drugs, fentanyl pressed into ersatz ache tablets, medication laced with surprising adulterants, and the proliferation of the fentanyl analogs to which legislators at the moment are responding of their typical ham-handed method.

The bipartisan assist for the HALT Fentanyl Act reveals that almost all politicians have realized nothing from greater than a century of unintended however fully predictable penalties like these. As drug-related deaths attain file ranges not simply regardless of however largely due to their basically misguided efforts, they conclude that the reply is extra of the identical. As a substitute of the hurt discount that Biden supposedly helps, they appear bent on hurt maximization, and Biden is becoming a member of their pernicious panic.

The place that critics like Perez Medina, Pitter, Komar, Pallone, and Massie are taking is similar because the place that Biden took throughout his presidential marketing campaign, when he offered himself as a drug warrior who had seen the error of his draconian methods and embraced legal justice reform. Now Biden is reverting to the sample he established throughout his 36 years within the Senate, responding to an issue created by prohibition with extra prohibition and embracing incarceration as an answer to the hurt attributable to the federal government’s doomed and disastrous try to cease folks from consuming psychoactive substances that politicians have deemed insupportable.