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As U.S. Attorney, I have a lot of heavy days. There is no joy in sending people to prison, no matter how much they deserve it. But the greatest weight comes from meeting families who have lost someone they love. More often than not, the killer is not a person. It’s fentanyl.
Fentanyl is a ruthless killer, targeting the very young. It is now the leading cause of death for Americans between the ages of 18 and 45. Think about that: if you have reached age 18, but are not yet 45, you are more likely to die of fentanyl than anything else. Every day, fentanyl claims the lives of more than 100 Americans with only a tiny amount — a lethal dose fits on the tip of a sharpened pencil.
In my office, fentanyl has become a daily reality in all types of cases. Other drugs are laced with fentanyl — making it more potent and addictive, driving more business to drug dealers — and counterfeit pills marketed as prescriptions for sleep or focus are nothing more than fentanyl in disguise. Fentanyl has been found in fake candy and baby bottles. I even met a mother who lost her daughter after taking a sip from a water bottle that had been contaminated with fentanyl. It is an epidemic.
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President Trump has recognized the problem and taken extensive executive action — five executive orders in addition to other proclamations and determinations. Those efforts, along with stronger border security, have produced measurable results. Less fentanyl is making it to the streets and drug dealers are using less of it in their products, resulting in lives saved. The number of fentanyl pills containing a lethal dose has dropped dramatically, from 76% in 2023 to just 29% now. The same is true in powder form, where purity dropped from 19.5% to 10.3%.
But to truly dismantle drug trafficking organizations, prosecutors must have the tools to remove the most dangerous dealers from the streets and deter others from entering the trade. The best way to do that is lengthier mandatory minimum sentences.
Currently, there is no federal mandatory minimum sentence for trafficking up to 40 grams of fentanyl — enough to kill 20,000 people. After that, the minimums are low — just 5 years. The minimum only rises to 10 years for 400 grams, which could kill 200,000 people.
Despite the death rate associated with fentanyl, those minimum sentences pale in comparison to other drugs. Federal prosecutors often prioritize methamphetamine charges because the mandatory minimum for selling just 50 grams is 10 years. It would take 8 times as much fentanyl to trigger the same mandatory sentence, but fentanyl kills twice as many people.
We know that higher mandatory minimums produce results because states have already conducted the experiment. In my state of North Carolina, mandatory minimums begin at just 4 grams. Traffic 28 grams of fentanyl, and you face a mandatory 19 years in prison. Alabama has gone even further: trafficking just 4 grams there carries a mandatory minimum sentence of 25 years, while anything over 8 grams requires life imprisonment. In other words, what requires a life sentence in Alabama carries no minimum in the federal system; five times that would require just a 10-year federal sentence.
States with strict minimum sentences have shown results. In both Alabama and North Carolina, drug overdose deaths are down 25% over the last year.
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West Virginia has taken a different approach. Although its mandatory minimum sentences are less severe than those in North Carolina or Alabama, they apply at even smaller quantities — less than one gram, the lowest threshold in the nation. There, fentanyl deaths fell by nearly 20% in a year.
In early 2025, Senator Kennedy and five colleagues introduced a bill to lower the fentanyl thresholds for federal mandatory minimums, but the bill has not gained meaningful traction.
Meanwhile, more than 38,000 Americans died from fentanyl in 2025. Their graves would stretch across nearly 30 football fields. Imagine standing at one goal line and looking across row after row of headstones until they disappeared into the distance. It is difficult to comprehend how anyone can look at that devastation and conclude there are more pressing priorities.
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