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(CNN) — President Joe Biden on Wednesday will call on federal agencies and Congress to take actions to curb the flow of fentanyl into the United States – an issue that has been a major theme of GOP attacks on the administration over the southern border.
Biden will issue a national security memorandum directing federal departments and agencies to “work together” and “share information,” a senior administration official said in a briefing previewing the memorandum. The president is also expected to encourage Congress to pass a multi-pronged effort to close some loopholes and better detect fentanyl when it comes into the country.
“Today, I will issue a National Security Memorandum directing every federal Department and Agency to do even more to stop the flow of narcotics—including fentanyl—into our country,” Biden said in a statement. “It will increase intelligence collection on traffickers’ evolving tactics to smuggle narcotics into our country. And it will help our law enforcement personnel seize more deadly drugs before they reach our communities.”
Fentanyl is up to 50 times more potent than heroin and kills tens of thousands of Americans each year.
The memorandum comes as former President Donald Trump’s and Vice President Kamala Harris’ campaigns go on the offensive on each other’s immigration policies as they race to secure an advantage in a presidential campaign dramatically altered in recent days by Biden’s decision to step aside from the 2024 Democratic ticket.
Biden is also expected to call upon Congress Wednesday to pass what the administration is referring to as the “Detect and Defeat proposal.”
“The proposal would give border officials the tools they need to more effectively track and target the millions of small-dollar shipments that cross our borders every day—closing a loophole that drug traffickers exploit. It would establish a nation-wide pill press and tableting machine registry so that law enforcement officials can track these machines and protect against their illicit use in producing fake fentanyl pills. And it would permanently regulate fentanyl-related substances as ‘Schedule I’ drugs—subjecting the distribution and possession of these drugs to heightened penalties,” the White House said.
The president is expected to receive a briefing on Wednesday afternoon on the “ongoing work to crack down on drug traffickers smuggling deadly drugs, including fentanyl,” according to the White House.
The expected announcements come a day after the Trump campaign unleashed its first major ad blitz targeting Harris, zeroing in on her immigration record in ads running across several key battleground states.
The vice president’s reelection campaign has offered the first glimpse of how it plans to counter those attacks. A 50-second campaign video, released first to CNN Tuesday, draws a contrast between Trump’s immigration policies and Harris’ immigration policies – notably leaning on border security and citing Harris’ support of investing in new technology to block fentanyl from entering the US.
Fentanyl has been driving the latest wave of overdose deaths, with synthetic opioids involved in more than two-thirds of overdose deaths last year, according to preliminary data from the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s National Center for Health Statistics.
While drug overdose deaths in the United States ticked down in 2023 for the first time in five years after a steep rise during the Covid-19 pandemic, these highly potent narcotics continue to play an outsized role. They were involved in nearly 70% of overdose deaths in 2023. However, there were about 1,500 fewer overdose deaths involving fentanyl and other synthetic opioids in 2023 than in 2022, the new data shows.
More than 115 million pills containing illicit fentanyl were seized by law enforcement in 2023, compared with about 71 million in 2022 and fewer than 50,000 in 2017.
CNN’s Fredreka Schouten, Priscilla Alvarez, and Deidre McPhillips contributed to this report.
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