The House passed the HALT Fentanyl Act on Thursday, sending the bill to President Donald Trump’s desk for his signature.
“This legislation is long overdue and is a major win in the fight to take our country back from the cartels, the traffickers, and every last open-border bureaucrat who allowed this crisis to spiral out of control,” Rep. Addison McDowell, R-N.C., whose younger brother died from a fentanyl overdose, said in a video message Thursday.
“Let us be clear,” McDowell said, “fentanyl is a chemical weapon.”
The bill passed in the House with bipartisan support in a vote of 321-104 less than a month after sailing through the Senate with similar bipartisan backing.
The bill is aimed at cracking down on the scourge of fentanyl, a synthetic opioid that is now the No. 1 cause of death for people between the ages of 18 to 45, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reported in 2023.
The HALT Fentanyl Act permanently reclassifies fentanyl and “fentanyl-related substances,” as a Schedule I controlled substance. Possession of a Schedule I controlled substance brings with it more severe sentences.
While fentanyl is already a controlled substance, drug traffickers—including cartels—have sought to circumvent the law by making slight chemical alterations to the lethal drug.
Drug dealers sometimes mix powdered fentanyl with heroin or cocaine to increase the strength of those drugs.
Fentanyl is a highly lethal synthetic opioid, and as little as 2 milligrams can kill. It is 50 to 100 times stronger than morphine, the CDC says.
When someone consumes fentanyl, the drug binds to opioid receptors in the brain, the spinal cord, or the peripheral nervous system to block pain. Fentanyl also prompts a large release of dopamine in the brain, which creates a feeling of pleasure or euphoria.
Fentanyl slows the body’s central nervous system, including breathing. An overdose of the drug overwhelms the nervous system and may cause breathing to stop altogether.
Since 2018, more than 250,000 Americans have died from fentanyl overdoses. In fiscal year 2024 alone, U.S. Customs and Border Protection seized 21,889 pounds of fentanyl—enough to kill nearly 5 billion people, more than half the global population.
Bradley Devlin contributed to this report.