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Fentanyl is bad enough. But when you discover that the synthetic drugs you're injecting into your bloodstream are not only killing you, but causing your body to decay while you're still alive, you know you're in deep trouble.
Unfortunately, that's where reluctant addicts like Tracey McCann find themselves: unintentionally tied to a drug supply tainted by a novel substance of next-level toxicity. Tracey calls it "self-destruction at its finest." Medical professionals call it xylazine.
Xylazine was created as an animal sedative. It's extremely powerful and completely unfit for humans, as evidenced by the fact that it rots users' flesh. But when American drug traffickers discovered they could mix it with opioids to reduce production costs, increase psychoactive effects, and boost addictivity––and that they could acquire it easily online from veterinary medicine suppliers––they introduced it to the streets.
The results have been catastrophic. Where xylazine taints the entire illicit drug supply, as it has in Philadelphia, getting sober becomes drastically more difficult, and drug use becomes dramatically more dangerous––especially because the most effective overdose treatment, naloxone, doesn't work on sedatives.
As you read this, illicit xylazine is being shipped across the entire nation. Soon it will be in all 50 states.
Meanwhile, the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) warns that nitazene, a new class of synthetic opioid that can be 10 times stronger than fentanyl and has never been approved for human use in the United States, is also being mixed into the drug stream. The number of nitazene-related overdose deaths in Tennessee increased fourfold from 2020 to 2021. This newcomer is cause for serious concern.
Federal policymakers must act quickly. Only the federal government has the resources to prevent these drugs from becoming mainstays in the American black market. But what are our next steps?
For Congress, step one is to pass the bipartisan Combating Illicit Xylazine Act, which would officially list xylazine as an illicit drug, thereby empowering law enforcement to keep closer track of the growing threat and take broader action against the criminals behind it. This bill would also penalize the international xylazine trade to keep the sedative out of the country entirely.
Step two is to enact the same protections against nitazene, which the DEA has provisionally listed as an illicit drug since December 2021. We need to make that listing permanent.
Finally, targeting fentanyl "fillers" will not be enough unless we also target fentanyl itself. Congress must crack down on the opioid's production and sale. This means passing the bipartisan FEND Off Fentanyl Act, which would sanction the Latin American drug traffickers who bring fentanyl precursors across our borders, and the HALT Fentanyl Act, which would list fentanyl analogs as illicit drugs.
It also means passing my forthcoming legislation to list fentanyl precursors as illicit drugs and sanction Chinese institutions that facilitate illegal drug transactions through money laundering.
There is a group of progressive activists—including some Biden administration insiders—who would delay these actions. Some frame drug legalization and "harm reduction" as the answers to all our problems. Others are not as naïve, but they believe a "climate deal" with Beijing is worth withholding sanctions on Chinese drug dealers.
But this is not a partisan issue for most Americans. Cartels, gangs, and mobs are flooding our streets with poison. Hundreds of thousands of people are dying as a result. If we don't try to protect them, we aren't worthy of being called public servants.
Marco Rubio, a Republican, is the senior U.S. senator from Florida.
The views expressed in this article are the writer's own.
