February 3, 2025–Due Process Institute and 190 national, state, and local public health, criminal justice, and civil rights organizations joined in a letter to House and Senate leadership urging them to reject and vote NO on the Halt All Lethal Trafficking of Fentanyl (HALT) Act (H.R. 27 / S. 331). This bill permanently schedules fentanyl-related substances (FRS) on schedule I of the Controlled Substances Act (CSA) based on a flawed class definition, imposes mandatory minimums, and fails to provide an offramp for removing inert or harmless substances from the drug schedule.
The classwide scheduling approach endorsed in the HALT Fentanyl Act classifies all FRS as schedule I drugs, reserved for substances with no currently accepted medical use and a high potential for abuse. This class definition, however, is a radical departure from drug scheduling practices as it relies exclusively on chemical structure without accounting for pharmacological effect based on the unproven hypothesis of chemical structure-function relationships. Contrary to this hypothesis, structurally related substances can often have complementary therapeutic values. In fact, the National Institute on Drug Abuse (NIDA) has already acknowledged that some FRS are inert and that at least one may be an opioid antagonist that behaves like naloxone, which is itself an opium derivative that counteracts the effects of opioid drugs. Classifying all FRS in schedule I places undue restrictions on research for therapeutic potential of FRS. This means that researchers and scientists are not able to study these substances at a time when the U.S. is experiencing unprecedented overdose deaths.
The HALT Fentanyl Act also enshrines mandatory minimums for distribution of FRS under the Controlled Substances Act, an inappropriate mandate that criminalizes possibly inert or harmless substances. While some proponents of the HALT Fentanyl Act claim that the bill is not intended to interact with the criminal justice system and that mandatory minimums are primarily a deterrent against foreign import of FRS, this is simply inaccurate. The HALT Fentanyl Act expands mandatory minimums for both foreign importation crimes and domestic drug distribution offenses, including nonviolent drug distribution involving small quantities of drugs. What’s more, by automatically scheduling a huge swathe of substances in one fell swoop, the HALT Fentanyl Act would lead to very real criminal justice consequences, posing an unacceptable risk of unnecessary incarceration for substances that carry no potential for abuse. Such miscarriages of justice have already occurred. For instance, Todd Coleman was sentenced to a mandatory minimum of 10 years for sale of cocaine that a crime laboratory said was laced with three fentanyl analogues, only to discover, years later, that the detected adulterants were not illegal fentanyl analogues and most were not even controlled substances.3 Our country is repeating past missteps when it comes to policy responses to fentanyl and its analogues. In the 1980s, policymakers enacted severe mandatory minimums for small amounts of crack cocaine in response to media headlines and law enforcement warnings that perpetuated mythology and fear.