FLAILING ON FENTANYL
As fentanyl tore across New England, Kelly Ayotte, then a U.S. senator from New Hampshire, introduced legislation to combat the powerful drug. It was September 2015, just months after the DEA issued a “nationwide alert” warning of a fentanyl surge and a spate of deaths in her state, as well as in New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Rhode Island and Missouri.
A former prosecutor and Republican state attorney general who handled myriad drug cases, Ayotte was surprised at fentanyl’s rapid rise. She learned it was being manufactured in China and sent to the United States through the mail or smuggled over the Mexican border before wending its way into the nation’s illicit drug supply.
Her bill would have mandated a 10- to 20-year prison term for anyone convicted of distributing certain amounts of fentanyl and would have reduced the quantity of the drug necessary to trigger stiff prison sentences.
Around the same time, on the other side of the Capitol, then-Rep. Thomas J. Rooney (R-Fla.) and Rep. Tim Ryan (D-Ohio) led a bipartisan group of 11 co-sponsors in introducing a companion bill to Ayotte’s.
Ayotte almost immediately ran into a roadblock. The Senate was attempting to pass a sweeping criminal justice reform bill that would overhaul sentencing for drugs, including shortening the duration of mandatory sentences. Some thought Ayotte’s bill would clash with the effort and possibly imperil the bill’s passage. The fentanyl-related bills never received a vote.
An early warning about fentanyl went unheeded.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/graphics/2019/investigations/fentanyl-epidemic-congress/?wpisrc=al_news__alert-politics--alert-national&wpmk=1
What say ye Mitch McConnell?