Political Quotes

“I thank my colleague and friend on the Rules Committee for yielding me the time. Our proposal to defeat the previous question and offer this amendment would do no underlying violence to the two bills--it has nothing to do with them--but it would save lives of all kinds of people in America. You see, fentanyl is a synthetic, manmade opioid. It is 50 times more potent than heroin. It is 100 times more potent than morphine. It is a scheduled drug under the Controlled Substances Act. However, Madam Speaker, drug traffickers are able to make small changes to fentanyl and its chemical structure, and that creates a new variation of the substance. Now, these so-called analogues are not on the schedule of controlled drugs. They are outside of the control of law enforcement, and they are incredibly dangerous--may I say, deadly. For example, one of these analogues, carfentanil, is 100 times as potent as the same amount of fentanyl, 5,000 times more potent than a unit of heroin, and 10,000 times as potent as a unit of morphine. Now, the creation of analogues outpaced the Drug Enforcement Administration's ability to schedule them, so the DEA used emergency authorities to place all of the analogues in schedule I. The Controlled Substances Act, the CSA, provides the Attorney General with the authority to temporarily place a substance in schedule I of the CSA for 2 years if he finds that such action is necessary to avoid an imminent hazard to the public safety.…”