Senate nears final approval of a bill that could increase penalties for fentanyl traffickers

WASHINGTON (AP) — The Senate was preparing Friday to give final approval to a bill that could result in harsher prison sentences for fentanyl traffickers as both Republicans and Democrats seek to show they can act to rein in distribution of the deadly drug.

The bill has already passed the House and has picked up Democratic support in the Senate, showing many in the party are eager to clamp down on fentanyl distribution following an election in which Republican Donald Trump harped on the problem. House Republicans passed a similar bill in 2023 with dozens of Democrats joining in support, but it languished in the Democratic-held Senate.

Critics say the proposal repeats the mistakes of the so-called “war on drugs,” which imprisoned millions of people addicted to drugs, particularly Black Americans.

Now, with Republicans in control of the Senate, Majority Leader John Thune has prioritized the legislation, making it one of the early bills to send to Trump for his signature. The president has indicated he will sign it.

Thune said this week the legislation “gives law enforcement a critical tool to go after the criminals bringing this poison into our country and selling it on our streets.”

Called the HALT Fentanyl Act, the bill would permanently place all copycat versions of fentanyl — alterations of the drug that are often sold by traffickers — on the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration's list of most dangerous drugs, known as Schedule 1. The drugs had already been temporarily placed on the list since 2018, but that designation was set to expire at the end of the month. The move would mean an increase in criminal convictions for distributing fentanyl-related substances, according to the Congressional Budget Office.

The legislation also seeks to make it easier to research the drugs.

The bill passed the House last month with 98 Democrats and every Republican except Rep. Thomas Massie of Kentucky in support. In the Senate, a majority of Democrats have supported the push to bring it to final passage. Law enforcement groups have also supported the bill.

“This is bipartisan because, frankly, fentanyl is a bipartisan problem," said Sen. Bill Cassidy, the Louisiana Republican who has sponsored the bill.

Both Democrats and Republicans in Congress have found agreement on trying to halt the flow of fentanyl into the United States, where it is blamed for tens of thousands of overdose deaths every year. Trump has said that halting the illicit flow of fentanyl is one of the top goals of his on-again-off-again tariff threats against Mexico, Canada and China.

But some progressive Democrats said the bill was missing an opportunity to tackle root causes of addiction or to focus on stopping the drug from entering the U.S.

Sen. Ed Markey, a Massachusetts Democrat, said in a statement that support for the bill was “enabling a political stunt at the expense of real solutions.”

The bill will “do little to actually solve the fentanyl crisis but will make it harder to research addiction and overdose reversal medication, disrupt communities and families by incarcerating rather than treating addiction, and divert resources from methods that work to disrupt the flow of fentanyl in the United States to strategies from the outdated War-on-Drugs solutions that do not work,” Markey added.

The average prison sentence for those convicted of trafficking fentanyl-related drugs was seven years and three months in 2023, according to the U.S. Sentencing Commission. Almost 60% of those convicted were Black, 23% were Hispanic and 16% were white.