(Washington) The US Congress adopted a bill on Thursday which plans to strengthen criminal sanctions against fentanyl traffic, an opioid behind hundreds of thousands of overdose deaths in the United States in recent years.
The “fentanyl act”, named after this powerful synthetic opioid, was adopted in the House of Representatives with 321 for, including a hundred elected officials from the Democratic minority, and 104 against. Already passed through the Senate, the text must now land on Donald Trump’s office for promulgation.
The new law provides in particular a minimum sentence of 10 years in prison for any traffic of more than 100 grams of fentanyl or a “similar substance”.
In 2024, 80,391 people died due to an overdose in the United States, a fall of 27 % compared to the 110,035 deaths recorded the previous year, and the lowest figure since 2019.
The number of deaths linked to fentanyl also plunged from around 76,000 in 2023 to 48,422 last year.
The head of the Republican majority in the Senate, John Thune, underlined Thursday that “more Americans die of drug overdoses each year than the number of Americans who died in the whole of the Vietnam War”.
Despite the relative consensus in the congress between Republicans and Democrats on the “Fentanyl Act Hart”, several associations expressed their opposition to the text.
For the leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights, “instead of really confronting the overdoses crisis, this bill will simply repeat the errors of the war against drugs”, led by the United States since the presidency of Richard Nixon in the early 1970s.
With the floor penalties, “the judges are prevented from modulating the punishment of an accused by taking into account the past of the individual,” added the association in a statement on Thursday.
The opioid crisis found its roots in the 1990s when drug manufacturers flooded the market with prescription pain relievers such as oxycontin.
The current wave is fueled by fentanyl, an analgesic also prescribed by doctors today diverted. The vast majority of the fentanyl circulating in the United States is illicitly manufactured in China and introduces via Mexico.
More than a million Americans have died by overdose over the past 20 years.
