Joe Biden opened the southern border, and what came across was death.

What if a significant tool in the hands of law enforcement and prosecutors was allowed to expire when a legislative fix was possible?

Last week, the Halt All Lethal Trafficking of Fentanyl Act was blocked from a vote by House Democrats. This HALT Fentanyl Act, sponsored by Representatives Morgan Griffith (R-VA) and Kat Cammack (R-FL), would make permanent the ban on fentanyl-related substances first issued in February 2018, set to expire February 2022. This was specifically requested in the Department of Justice written testimony to the Senate Judiciary Committee in June 2019. If Congress failed to act, the joint statement from Amanda Liskaam, director of Opioid Enforcement and Prevention Efforts, and Greg Cherundolo, CEO of the DEA’s Office of Global Enforcement, included the reality that “savvy clandestine manufacturers and traffickers [would] respond to the re-emerging gap in US law by again producing novel fentanyl-like substances.”

Fentanyl analogues and fentanyl-related substances are the precursors to the fake fentanyl mixed up by enterprising drug dealers in their makeshift home chemistry labs, and the HALT Fentanyl Act would permanently label them as substances with no currently accepted medical use and a high potential for abuse. The key in the legislative solution kept from a vote by Democrats is to equip agents to target the specific chemical companies manufacturing the essential ingredients. Current laws allow producers to change their recipes and skirt the law, whipping up a deadly drug that is estimated to be 100 times more potent than morphine and 50 times more potent than heroin. Ingesting as little as two milligrams, about the size of five grains of salt, can produce trouble breathing, dizziness and disorientation, and even overdose, according to the National Institute on Drug Abuse.

The soft-on-crime Democrats can’t be bothered with the open border, the known movement of these powerful substances from China, or any attempt to assist with efforts to stop the flow of substances that are destroying lives, livelihoods, and entire communities. They are too busy keeping businesses monitored for COVID-related “safety” and fearmongering about a virus that is becoming as endemic as influenza. While public health is permitting itself to be weaponized by the political Left, a pandemic that kills almost all of its victims, wrecks families, and destroys lives is being ignored.

In a February 3 article, investigative journalist Sara Carter reports, “Between May 2020 and April 2021 more than a hundred thousand overdose deaths occurred in the United States — an increase of nearly 30 percent over the previous year.” Looking at projections using data through June 2021, that number was expected to reach 101,263 in a rolling 12-month average.

These counterfeited potent substances are coming almost exclusively from China and being moved into the U.S. across Joe Biden’s wide-open southern border. Carter points out how the Biden administration has failed on two fronts: dealing with illegal immigration and the drug cartels and dealing with the Chinese. She reports that U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP) seized a record-breaking 11,201 pounds of fentanyl in 2021. In the first three months of fiscal year 2022, more than 2,700 pounds were seized — almost as much as the 2,804 pounds seized during the entirety of 2019.

While Democrats fixate on COVID as most are building their own immunity to a virus that will be with us annually, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and her lockstep followers blocked a vote that has been bipartisan in years past. Every single Democrat attorney general added their names in 2018 and 2019 requesting that Congress pass legislation to do just as the HALT Fentanyl Act proposes.

As the peddlers of this deadly poison mix their million-dollar product in Magic Bullet blenders (literally), Americans die, and our law enforcement officers are exposed, many times unknowingly, to the same drugs that kill the addicted. The Biden administration, Nancy Pelosi’s House, and Chuck Schumer’s Senate are proving what we’ve seen for years: Democrats stand against our law enforcement, choose power politics over principled policies, and work the press to ensure their crisis-of-the-day prevails.

Written by Robin Smith for Patriot Post ~ February 7, 2022

FAIR USE NOTICE: This site contains copyrighted material the use of which has not always been specifically authorized by the copyright owner. We are making such material available in our efforts to advance understanding of environmental, political, human rights, economic, democracy, scientific, and social justice issues, etc. We believe this constitutes a ‘fair use’ of any such copyrighted material as provided for in section 107 of the US Copyright Law. In accordance with Title 17 U. S. C. Section 107, the material on this site is distributed without profit to those who have expressed a prior interest in receiving the included information for research and educational purposes. For more information go to: http://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/17/107.shtml