Sen. Marco Rubio of Florida and more than a dozen Senate Republicans say anyone who causes someone’s death by distributing fentanyl should face felony murder charges under federal law.
Mr. Rubio filed legislation to impose severe penalties on dealers, including the death penalty or life imprisonment, as Washington scrambles to rein in the steady stream of deadly synthetic opioids that Mexican cartels are sending across the border.
“We need to stop the flow of fentanyl and punish those responsible for poisoning our communities,” Mr. Rubio said. “If the illicit sale of this drug results in death, then the seller should be charged with felony murder. That is a simple, common sense step we can take right now to help turn the tide and protect our communities.”
Mr. Rubio filed his bill a few days after President Biden called on Congress to “stiffen penalties” for fentanyl traffickers.
Mr. Biden was referring to an effort to permanently schedule fentanyl-related substances as a class on Schedule I to ensure harsh penalties for traffickers instead of letting the substances fall out of the stringent category in December 2024.
However, a White House plan says that fentanyl-related substances should be exempted from mandatory minimum criminal penalties for offenses based on the quantity of a drug an offender had.
House Republicans say that would undermine the point of putting the drugs on the list of Schedule I list of substances with the highest risk of abuse.
Overdose deaths involving a synthetic opioid have soared from nearly 10,000 in 2015 and 20,000 in 2016 — the period when fentanyl started to infiltrate the U.S. drug supply — to 56,000 in 2020 and more than 70,000 in 2021, according to the most recent federal figures available based on death certificates.
The rate of annual drug-overdose deaths of any kind peaked at 110,000 for the 12 months preceding March 2022, before declining for five months in a row, though lawmakers are pressuring the Biden administration to do more.
Rep. Dan Crenshaw, Texas Republican, and Rep. Mike Waltz, Florida Republican, introduced a bill that would create an Authorization for Use of Military Force to target the Jalisco and Sinaloa Mexican drug cartels
“We cannot allow heavily armed and deadly cartels to destabilize Mexico and import people and drugs into the United States. We must start treating them like ISIS — because that is who they are,” Mr. Crenshaw said.
Sen. Chris Murphy, Connecticut Democrat, on Thursday urged the State Department to engage with China, which stopped shipping fentanyl directly to the U.S. under pressure from the Trump administration in 2019 but is now shipping fentanyl-precursor chemicals to Mexico.
U.S. Deputy Secretary of State Wendy Sherman told the senator that Secretary of State Antony Blinken will raise the issue “when he does get back to meeting in Beijing, which we will do when we think conditions are right.”
Mr. Blinken’s planned trip was scrapped due to a confrontation over the Chinese spy balloon that was discovered over the continental U.S.
“We have engaged not only Mexico, but other countries to put pressure on China and other countries where their precursor chemicals, not only fentanyl but methamphetamine and other illicit synthetic drugs,” Ms. Sherman said. “This is a really terrible problem. We are taking a laser focus on organizing an international effort to stop this.”
• Tom Howell Jr. can be reached at thowell@washingtontimes.com.