The House of Representatives voted 320–88 on Wednesday evening to extend a federal ban on fentanyl and its analogs, despite the dissenting votes and voices of 86 Democrats.
The bill, S.3201, passed the Senate unanimously, but languished in the House for almost two weeks, running dangerously close to a Feb. 6 deadline after which the Drug Enforcement Administration’s blanket scheduling of fentanyl and its analogs was set to expire. Such a lapse would have made it substantially harder for federal law enforcement to prosecute dealers of the drugs responsible for tens of thousands of deaths over the past several years.
Even as they debated the bill Wednesday morning, however, some House Democrats still voiced concerns over a bill they saw as too tough on crime. Such arguments, alongside the dissenting vote from within the Democratic caucus, raise serious questions about Democrats’ commitment to using all tools available to fight the deadliest drug crisis in American history.
There are a number of different chemical variations—called “analogs”—of the synthetic opioid fentanyl. In 2018, faced with a wave of new analogs, many of which were not technically illegal under the Controlled Substances Act, the DEA used its administrative authority to temporarily place them all in schedule one, the strictest control category in the CSA. – READ MORE