Welcome everybody.
Today’s hearing is on fentanyl and fentanyl related substances.
Before I begin, I want to take a moment to welcome members of the audience. We have about 30 guests today, including parents of kids who have tragically died from fentanyl poisoning as well as law enforcement officers who have a strong interest in this issue.
Thank you for coming to this important hearing.
Fentanyl accounts for the vast majority of drug overdose deaths in the United States every year.
In the last full year for which we have data – 2023, around 75,000 lives were lost to fentanyl alone. That’s more than 200 people dying every day.
We titled this hearing, “The Poisoning of America,” because most Americans don’t know they’re taking fentanyl.
Many are children who think they’re taking something else that turns out to be laced with fentanyl.
There are countless families with tragic stories.
The Arwine family from Lisbon, Iowa, is one of them.
Laurie Arwine sent us a letter that I’d like to introduce into the record.
Laurie’s youngest son, Bailey, was taken on April 5, 2022. He was 22 years old.
He was not a drug addict. He did not think he was taking fentanyl, but the pill he took was laced with fentanyl.
Laurie wrote, “Fentanyl stole our son’s future and the joy of watching Bailey marry the love of his life, having a mother/son dance, watching him buy his first home, watching him become a loving father and our joy of having more grandchildren.
“We will never know if any of his children, our grandchildren, would have Bailey’s curly hair, his cute smirky smile or his twinkling blue eyes. There will always be an empty chair at our family gatherings – Thanksgiving, Christmas, Easter, birthdays, family dinners. His voice and laughter will forever be silenced.”
Maybe the saddest part of the fentanyl crisis is that so many parents can tell a similar story of loss. In fact, we have many of them with us here today, including two of our witnesses.
I want to tell the parents in the audience today: thank you for being here. Thank you for making your voices heard. Thank you for doing what you can do to keep other parents from going through what you have gone through.
How long do we have to keep suffering through this attack on our children?
This is not an easy problem to solve, but there are certain parts of the problem that are simple to address.
For one thing, common sense border control will help stem the flow of fentanyl across the border.
We have no idea how many pounds of fentanyl were carried in by got-a-ways that will never show up in any statistics.
We also have no idea how many surges of illegal immigrants have been used by the cartels as a distraction to push drugs through understaffed ports of entry.
Thankfully, the Trump administration is taking this threat seriously.
Another simple thing to address is fentanyl knock-offs. Fentanyl is a substance easily changed by the drug cartels to bypass the legal scheduling while becoming even more deadly.
That’s why, in 2018, the Drug Enforcement Administration scheduled fentanyl knock-offs as a class using a formula created by an emergency room doctor. He’s here today, and he’ll tell us more about this problem.
Congress temporarily extended that scheduling over and over again.
We’ve played this game for long enough. It’s time to make this temporary scheduling permanent, so that the drug cartels do not have the opportunity to flood our country with even deadlier versions of fentanyl.
Last week, Senator Cassidy and I introduced a bipartisan bill to do just that. Seven Democrat Senators co-sponsored it. We should pass that bill quickly because the temporary scheduling expires on March 31st.
We must get this done. We must also support President Trump’s attempt to secure the border and deal with the Mexican drug cartels.
America’s children need us to act.
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