President Donald Trump celebrated signing the HALT Fentanyl Act into law with a pledge to continue working to reduce drug-related deaths across the country.
“Today, we strike a righteous blow to the drug dealers, narcotic traffickers, and criminal cartels that we have all been hearing so much about for so many years, and very little has been done,” Trump said Wednesday at the White House. “We take a historic step toward justice for every family touched by the fentanyl scourge as we sign the HALT Fentanyl Act into law.”
The HALT Fentanyl Act permanently schedules illicit fentanyl-related substances, known as fentanyl analogs, as Schedule I drugs under the Controlled Substances Act, extending a temporary classification that was introduced in 2018 during Trump’s first administration and was poised to expire at the end of September.
“With this bill, we are officially and permanently classifying all fentanyl-related substances as Schedule I narcotics, which is actually a very big deal,” Trump said Wednesday. “Meaning, anyone caught trafficking these illicit poisons will be punished with a mandatory, 10-year minimum sentence in prison.”
He added, “The monsters who manufacture illicit fentanyl have sought to skirt legal restrictions by making minor variations of the chemical compound and, in the process, they have developed even more toxic versions of the drug.”
Trump used the bill signing event in the White House’s East Room to underscore the progress he has made during the first six months of his second administration regarding fentanyl and the border after he “inherited the worst drug crisis in American history.”
“We will be getting the drug dealers, pushers, and peddlers off our streets, and we will not rest until we have ended the drug overdose epidemic,” he said. “This was an invasion of our country, allowed to happen by people who didn’t care or were stupid people.”
Trump cited his deployment of military personnel to the border and designation of Mexican drug cartels as foreign terrorist organizations as his top drug-related policy accomplishments, in addition to his formation of multiple Department of Homeland Security drug-related task forces and the Justice Department‘s seizure of 4,500 pounds of fentanyl. At the same time, he said he almost had a deal with China to impose the death penalty on Chinese drug traffickers before “we had a rigged election.”
Trump also quipped that he would apportion responsibility to Gov. Glenn Youngkin (R-VA) if his recommended nominee for Drug Enforcement Administration administrator, Terry Cole, is not as “good” as the governor has promised.
Trump similarly previewed that he and his aides will start promoting his other legislative accomplishment, the “one big, beautiful bill,” soon, complaining that Democrats have contended it “represents death.”
“We’ll start talking about it, but once we do, I think we’re going to have the greatest midterm that we’ve ever seen,” he said.
In an earlier statement to the Washington Examiner, White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt said Trump signing the HALT Fentanyl Act would end “four years” of former President Joe Biden and Democrats “hardly” muttering “a word about the fentanyl crisis, which remains the No. 1 leading cause of death in our country.”
“President Trump has made securing the border and ending the drug crisis a top priority, and today, he will further follow through on his commitment to the courageous fentanyl moms and dads who elected him to Make America Safe Again,” Leavitt told the Washington Examiner.
A White House official explained to the Washington Examiner that a fentanyl analog is where drug manufacturers “change the chemical makeup just enough to skirt around the law.”
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“But it still kills just like regular fentanyl,” the official said. “So we must prosecute it the same way.”
“Scheduling [fentanyl-related substances] as a class removes the incentive for foreign terrorist organizations and cartels to continually create new synthetic, fentanyl-like compounds to evade the reach of the Controlled Substances Act,” the official continued. “Under the HALT Fentanyl Act, anyone who possesses, imports, distributes, or manufactures any illicit FRS will be subject to criminal prosecution in the same manner as any other Schedule I controlled substance.”