May 23, 2023–Due Process Institute led a letter with Drug Policy Alliance, FAMM, Law Enforcement Action Partnership, The Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights, The Sentencing Project, and Vera Institute of Justice, to express disappointment at the White House’s May 22, 2023 Statement of Administration Policy (“SAP”) on H.R. 467, the Halt All Lethal Trafficking of (HALT) Fentanyl Act. Perhaps inadvertently, the Administration’s statement failed to condemn the HALT Fentanyl Act’s expansion of mandatory minimums and encouraged Congress to throw its support behind legislation that will only exacerbate the harms of illicit drug activity and will do nothing to further the public health solutions urgently needed. We urge the Biden administration to issue a clear statement against the HALT Fentanyl Act and we ask Congress to vote no on this legislation.
The HALT Fentanyl Act fails to implement critical aspects of the Biden administration’s 2021 permanent fentanyl-related substances (FRS) scheduling proposal: 1) HALT fails to provide for “a streamlined process for the Department of Health and Human Services to identify and remove or reschedule any individual FRS” that does not pose a “high potential for abuse;” and 2) it contains no provision for studying the impact of permanent FRS scheduling on “research, civil rights, and the illicit manufacturing and trafficking of FRS.” These fatal flaws in the HALT Fentanyl Act — the absence of what the SAP calls “critical components” of any permanent FRS scheduling initiative — make it absolutely imperative that Congress votes no on the bill. A vote for the HALT Fentanyl Act is a vote against not just smart public health and public safety, but against your Administration’s stated position on permanent scheduling as well.
Disappointingly, the SAP does not mention yet another unacceptable aspect of the HALT Fentanyl Act: its entrenchment and expansion of mandatory minimums. As drafted, the HALT Fentanyl Act expressly entrenches quantity-based mandatory minimums for trafficking FRS. Under the HALT Fentanyl Act, a person who distributes just 10 grams of an FRS will be subject to a 5-year mandatory minimum prison term, which increases to a 10-year mandatory minimum prison term for trafficking 100 grams of FRS. What’s more, the HALT Fentanyl Act also expands mandatory minimums to non-FRS fentanyl-analogue trafficking. Section 6 of the HALT Fentanyl Act, as amended, would express Congress’s view that non-FRS analogues of fentanyl should be subject to the same harsh quantity-based mandatory minimums that the HALT Fentanyl Act applies to FRS trafficking under the classwide scheduling approach.