Congress Should Learn From the Past in Fight Against Opioids
When President Donald Trump declared America’s opioid crisis a national emergency last October, the announcement surprised few in the first responder and medical communities. Police, EMS personnel, and ER staffs have long had front row seats to witness the deadly effects of the drugging of America.
The cause of the emergency has of course been subject to debate. Many believe the over-prescribing of pain-numbing opioid medications is the culprit while others stress restrictions limiting the ability of the Drug Enforcement Administration to regulate and police pharmaceutical manufacturers. As a former FBI assistant director, however, I was surprised to find my colleagues at the DEA under attack from two surprising directions: Capitol Hill and their own Department of Justice. But the issue wasn’t opioids; it was marijuana.
During the Obama years, the DEA was being challenged by Congress and Attorney General Eric Holder’s DOJ to justify its stance on marijuana enforcement even while states such as Colorado were “legalizing” the gateway drug of choice. In House testimony in June 2012, the embattled DEA administrator, Michelle Leonhart, tried responding to questions from Rep. Steve Cohen (D-TN) by explaining that DEA was prioritizing pharmaceutical drugs at the top then focusing on the most impactful “poly-drug” criminal enterprises such as Mexican smuggling cartels for their enforcement efforts. Cohen was having none of it. His focus was singular: DEA’s position on marijuana enforcement.
Back in the Department of Justice, the attorney general was busy crafting what became known as “the Cole Memo,” curbing federal marijuana enforcement in cases where specified criteria were absent. While the memo was crafted with an eye to prioritizing limited resources, its message was clear: Marijuana use was no longer a concern and enforcement no longer a federal priority.
Lost in the multilateral shouting match over marijuana enforcement was the focus on the gathering storm of opioid abuse. Professional controls on prescription pain medications proved inadequate as millions of Americans, wealthy and poor, consumed increasing amounts of the drugs and fed a demand leading to addiction, overdose, and death. And lurking in darkened alleyways and abandoned buildings was another killer far more powerful than heroin: fentanyl.
Fast forward five years and the enforcement problems Rep. Cohen didn’t want to hear about are now central to the growing opioid crisis. We’ve since seen headlines about the drug industry’s influence on Congress and its role in handcuffing DEA enforcement efforts. (The disclosures had Congress scrambling last fall to pass new legislation to fix the problem.) But prescription opioids are only a part of the problem.
As Congress, DEA, and strengthened internal controls by the pharmaceutical industry have tightened prescription opioid supply, another industry has worked to evade detection and control. That industry and the poison it produces are both entirely illegal: it’s the production, smuggling, and distributing of heroin and fentanyl in America.
Fentanyl is a synthetic opioid that’s 50 times more potent than heroin and 100 times more potent than morphine. Even tiny amounts of fentanyl can sicken or kill, a lesson that police are increasingly aware of as some of their number have learned after exposure. So hazardous is the compound that police everywhere are adjusting search and seizure protocols to prevent the risk of accidental exposure.
Illegal fentanyl production and sale is profitable, so criminal enterprises and cartels from Mexico to China are hard at work smuggling in enough of the poison to kill millions. The drug is commonly found in powder form or pressed into counterfeit pills of dubious purity and strength. Even slight miscalculations in mixtures can result in overdose or death. And with its ability to be absorbed through the skin, even accidental touches pose great risk of harm.
Congress should take steps to avoid repeating its embarrassing and politically driven performances during the DEA administrator’s testimony almost six years ago. Countering this crisis will require a focused multilateral effort that goes well beyond increasing education and regulation or surveilling and policing the pharmaceutical and medical industries. Those industries are already under the microscope, with lawsuits and law enforcement scrutiny adding up with each overdose death. In the effort to reign in prescription opioids, lawmakers must not overlook illegal synthetic opioids, which are filling the void.
The corrupt networks already serving the demand for these deadly drugs are compelled by profit. They populate “dark web” sales portals, ship by mail, smuggle by land and sea. These threats are secretive, persistent, and not limited to the poisons they traffic, as graphically demonstrated by the ongoing carnage wrought by Mexican cartels across that country. Congress must resist the temptation to politicize this problem and instead empower law enforcement to do everything it can to attack it.
Ron Hosko is a former assistant director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation.
