“Let’s be honest: They started to act when their phones started ringing off the hook,” said Andrew Kessler, a policy consultant who specializes in behavioral health. Public health experts, advocates and many lawmakers believe the pieces of legislation are merely starting points and have not provided nearly enough money to help localities where it remains extremely difficult for drug users to get into treatment, even as fentanyl deaths continue unabated and people die while on waiting lists. While Congress passed bills to combat heroin and prescription drug abuse in 20 that expanded drug treatment and recovery programs and access to a medication that can reverse opioid overdoses, little has been done to specifically address fentanyl. Republican leaders, who controlled both houses of Congress from 2015 through 2018, say they took the threat of opioids seriously, and that lawmakers ultimately succeeded in passing legislation to fight it in a deeply partisan environment. “It’s hard to bring people together, hard to get stuff done around here.” “I think it’s just inertia,” Portman said. In Ohio, 7,940 people died from fentanyl overdoses between 20. They see Congress’s failure as emblematic of a body that acts slowly and unimaginatively to America’s most pressing problems. In recent interviews with The Washington Post, nearly two dozen current and former members of Congress expressed anger and exasperation that the rise of synthetic opioids drew so little notice and action in Washington.
But they were unable to pick up traction in Congress, controlled by Republicans for years, watching bills to address fentanyl languish and expire, sometimes, they said, at the behest of powerful interests including the pharmaceutical industry, which has made billions of dollars from opioids. Fentanyl death rates are still rising.Ī small group of lawmakers has been sounding the alarm on fentanyl since the drug started causing a spike in overdose deaths in 2013.
In that time, more than 67,000 Americans had died from overdoses of fentanyl and other synthetic opioids.
It took Congress until December 2017 to pass a bill specifically targeting fentanyl - nearly four years after legislators first received warnings about the dangers of the drug. “It wasn’t like I was being punished or something like that. “I get it, I understand that there’s some people who need victories more than people like me, somebody from a more competitive district,” he said. As a Republican from a reliably red district who wasn’t going to face a difficult path to reelection, he didn’t need a legislative success to tout on the campaign trail. Rooney said he doesn’t know why his bill failed but suspects electoral politics played a part. Rooney reintroduced the bill in 2017, but it again went nowhere. In New Hampshire, 1,216 people died from overdoses of fentanyl and other synthetic opioids between 20, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.Īyotte would lose her reelection bid the next year. senator from New Hampshire, who served from 2011 to 2017.
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