Biden mistakenly urges blanket fentanyl ban after 200K died on his watch
WASHINGTON — President Biden called Tuesday for fentanyl to be made a Schedule I drug, which would end its common medical uses — before aides clarified that he only wants to proscribe fentanyl-related compounds.
About 200,000 Americans have died during Biden’s term from synthetic opioids, shipped largely from China, and Biden made the remark while trying to put the ball back in Congress’ court after criticism from Republicans.
“Look, I also urge Congress to permanently make fentanyl and related substances Schedule I drugs,” Biden said at a White House meeting with executive branch officials following a summit last week with Chinese President Xi Jinping — who agreed to halt exports of the drugs, even though his prior pledges didn’t slow a surge in US deaths.
Biden has stoked outrage with prior imprecise remarks about the crisis, including a trio of errors in January and February when he twice misstated the US death toll and incorrectly described fentanyl’s potency.
“He is either clueless about this deadly crisis or simply doesn’t care,” Rep. Jim Banks (R-Ind.) tweeted earlier this year after one of the factual errors.
Fentanyl has a specific chemical formula — C22H28N2O — and like cocaine is a Schedule II drug, meaning it can be legally used with medical authorization to treat pain.
Schedule I drugs are defined as having no allowed medical use and cannot be prescribed.
Biden administration officials clarified to The Post that he was not actually calling for a ban on fentanyl, but for Congress to make permanent a 2018 emergency action that declared fentanyl-related substances as Schedule I drugs.
The administration aides insisted to The Post that the president didn’t misspeak when he called on Congress to make fentanyl a Schedule I drug because, they said, he was thinking about illicit street fentanyl, which may or may not contain fentanyl-related substances.
White House spokeswoman Kelly Scully said, “This is exactly what he intended to say. Today’s event is specifically about illicit fentanyl, not medical fentanyl.”
Fentanyl-related substances have slightly different chemical compositions than fentanyl itself, which in the past allowed traffickers to avoid penalties.
In recent weeks, Biden has increased his focus on fentanyl and said he knows multiple families who have had a relative die from contraband synthetic opioids, which generally are smuggled into the country rather than diverted from domestic medical supplies.
“Too many are going to face looking at an empty chair for the first time at Thanksgiving because so many people have died. It’s heartbreaking. It really is an American tragedy,” Biden said Tuesday.
“I’m committed to doing everything in my power as president to get this crisis under control,” he said.
Biden also urged Congress to approve $1.2 billion for fentanyl-screening equipment as part of a larger funding request in which he is seeking $14.3 billion to finance Israel’s war with Hamas and $61.4 billion to back Ukraine in its war with Russia.
A second Biden administration official, who specializes in the subject matter, told The Post that he didn’t consider Biden’s words inaccurate.
“When the president speaks about either fentanyl-related substances or fentanyl and related substances, it’s interchangeable. I use both of them all the time interchangeably,” the second official said.
Data on specific synthetic opioids and their respective contributions to record-high deaths are murky and often outdated.
“Currency is one of the bigger issues that we have because it takes a while to test these things. … Here we are in 2023 [and] depending on what you’re trying to get, data could be one to two years old just because it takes a long time for labs,” the second official said.
Some fentanyl-related compounds, such as acetyl fentanyl — whose chemical formula, C21H26N2O, has one fewer carbon atom and two fewer hydrogen atoms — can only be distinguished from fentanyl with secondary testing using gas chromatography and mass spectrometry.
Data from a group of 10 states collected through 2018 show that fentanyl-related substances were detected in a large share of overdose cases and that the leading variants changed over time.
Data also show, however, that some related compounds almost always appear alongside and are less potent than fentanyl itself. Some other related compounds, meanwhile, are more potent.
Federal data from 2019 indicate about 80% of offenders whose crimes involved synthetic opioids that year were busted for smuggling fentanyl rather than closely related substances.
It’s unclear how the 2018 scheduling of fentanyl-related compounds may have altered their illicit flow in the past five years.
CDC data on drug overdose deaths do not say whether fentanyl, a related compound, or both were detected, or if not enough information was available.
Preliminary data show that about 76,000 Americans died of synthetic opioids in 2022 — an all-time record, up from about 72,000 in 2021 and 58,000 in 2020.
The CDC projects that deaths from synthetic opioids continued to hit new monthly highs in the first half of 2023.
Xi’s commitment to halt exports has been met with skepticism — in part because former President Donald Trump boasted that he had convinced the Chinese leader to impose a severe crackdown including the execution of exporters, only for overdose deaths to continue to rise during his presidency.
National Security Council spokesman John Kirby said at a briefing Monday that “[Xi] has said he was going to be personally responsible for stemming the flow of these chemicals out of China, and we’re grateful for that.”
“That’s going to take a little bit of time as he goes back to Beijing and puts those processes in place — those law enforcement actions,” Kirby added.
