Nearly Half of House Dems Join GOP in Doubling Down on Failed Drug War Policy

Yesterday, the US House voted 312 to 108 for a Republican bill to double down on failed drug war strategies in response to the opioid crisis.

The bill, titled the HALT Fentanyl Act, would permanently schedule fentanyl-related substances on schedule I of the Controlled Substances Act , even if they are harmless, and would impose new mandatory minimums. Mandatory minimums, which eliminate judicial discrimination in sentencing, have been a driver of increased prison populations and have been shown to reflect racial biases in prosecution. They mean that more people stay in prison for longer, ballooning costs and harming communities without improving public safety.

The Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights strongly condemned the bill and explained the harms it would cause:

Harsh federal drug laws and mandatory minimums have caused the federal prison population to explode. The Urban Institute has found that increases in expected time served for drug offenses was the largest contributor to growth in the federal prison population between 1998 and 2010.[9] Currently, people convicted of drug offenses make up 43.9 percent of the Bureau of Prisons (BOP) population.[10] There is no indication that overly punitive sentences or mass incarceration deter crime, protect public safety, or decrease drug use or trafficking.[11]

We share your concerns about fentanyl-related deaths and support effective health-based approaches to mitigating this public health crisis, but classwide scheduling and mandatory minimums merely repeat the mistakes of the past by exacerbating our incarceration problem.

The Democratic caucus split almost evenly: 98 voted in favor, and 107 voted against. Tom Massie (KY-04) was the sole Republican to vote against the bill.

Here are the 107 who voted NO:

And these 98 Democrats voted YES: