By Evaristo Lara
Chip Roy, representative of Texas, promotes a project called “Deal Against Death, Face Death Act”, which requires the death penalty for people convicted of distributing fentanyl in the United States.
The Republican’s approach is to amend the Controlled Substances Act of 1970 and strengthen sentences against traffickers convicted after an evidentiary process.
Currently, this law classifies all regulated substances into one of five categories and establishes life imprisonment as the maximum penalty to punish the distribution of said substances.
However, during the decades that justice has been using this law, drugs have evolved to the point of being more destructive for those who end up getting hooked on them.
“They will be sentenced to death, if death results from the use of said substance,” Roy recently warned.
The danger of fentanyl circulating on the streets of some American cities leads to thousands of deaths of citizens each year, which is already considered a health crisis.
This approach has led President Donald Trump to classify drug cartels as terrorist groups.
“Every fentanyl death is preventable, and every trafficker who knowingly sells this poison has blood on his hands.
Americans are fed up with weak policies while their communities are destroyed and their loved ones buried.
The ‘Trafficking with Death, Face Death’ Act guarantees that traffickers who bring fentanyl into the country and cause a death can face the maximum punishment,” Chip Roy said during an interview with the newspaper. “The Hill.”
According to reports released by the National Center for Health Statistics of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, more than forty-eight thousand Americans died from fentanyl overdoses in 2024 alone.
Another aspect worth highlighting in the bill promoted by the Republican is that it seeks to double the fines arising as a result of crimes related to fentanyl.
So far, Roy’s plot consists of increasing the penalties directed at traffickers until they are set at $2,000,000 for individuals; while for non-individual entities the aim is to place them at $10,000,000 dollars.
Keep reading:
• US presents National Drug Administration Strategy 2026; intensifies war against fentanyl and cartels
• The US accuses a Mexican migrant of hiding more than 240,000 fentanyl pills in wooden furniture
• Todd Blanche report reopens debate on toughening the death penalty
