The United States Congress has just entered into a harsh controversy on how to deal with the problem in which several regions of that country are submerged by the excess of fentanyl addicts, the so-called zoombi drug that in 2022 alone killed 106,000 people.
In full swing due to the upcoming electoral campaign, and in which President Joe Biden wants to step hard, the Capitol was divided between those who ask to face this wave of vice with force and punishment of consumers and traffickers alike, and those who consider that the application of a prevention policy focused on public health is needed. And it is not a minor discussion.
During a hearing in Congress, in which this dilemma was analyzed, Erin Rachwal recounted that Logan, her 19-year-old son, was killed by this drug two years ago.
“No family is immune to this danger,” he said. And she clarified that she did not know “or the seriousness or lethality of fentanyl until her tragic death (that of her son)”, despite the fact that more than 106,000 people died in the country from drug overdoses or accidental poisoning last year. past.
Timothy Westlake, an ER doctor, explained that fentanyl is so toxic that “it has been used as a chemical weapon.” And he warned: “one teaspoon can kill 2,000 people.”
In this scenario, the congressmen of both benches –Democrats and Republicans– recognize the urgency to find a solution, but each party opts for different paths.
Republican Troy Nehls, from Texas, a state bordering Mexico – a country where the cartels produce most of the fentanyl with chemical precursors from China – defended the heavy hand.
He said he was in favor of “making the sale and distribution of fentanyl a capital offense, and the use of the death penalty.” Of course, he acknowledged that this will not solve the problem.
Derek Maltz, a former agent of the US drug enforcement agency (DEA), was blunt: “The narcoterrorists in Mexico are destroying our country, they must be held accountable, even if it means using our army.”
And he added: “We must destroy those production laboratories, and we cannot trust Mexico to do it.”
In contrast, Democrat Sheila Jackson Lee opposed increasing the minimum sentences, because that would prevent judges from considering “the unique facts and circumstances of the addict.”
This was backed by Jeffrey A. Singer, a researcher at the Cato Institute Foundation, for whom it is a mistake to focus only on supply. He considered it unlikely that “threatening drug traffickers with life imprisonment or the death penalty will deter drug trafficking” because most “already take risk into account when they enter the business and are more afraid of being killed by their rivals than of being killed.” the Department of Justice of the United States catches them”.
“The iron law of prohibition is what incentivizes the cartels to come up with more powerful forms” such as xylazine, a veterinary sedative that is mixed with fentanyl and can cause “deadly ulcers.”
Or another synthetic opioid, nitazene. “I wouldn’t be surprised if two or three years from now we’re talking about the nitazene crisis instead of the fentanyl crisis,” he warned. While this discussion is taking place in the Capitol, cities like Philadelphia and Los Angeles see their streets full of addicts as if they were the living dead.