This is the Cato Daily podcast for Wednesday, February 19th, 2025.

I'm Caleb Brown.

Legislation now working its way through Congress demonstrates lawmakers' inability or unwillingness to grapple with the realities of the war on drugs

and the public sector's broad inability to stem the flow of certain drugs.

The century of experience with Prohibition should have by now taught us at least that one lesson.

Cato's Jeff Singer discusses the so-called Halt-Fentanyl Act.

There are a lot of different ways that lawmakers want to deal with illegal drugs.

And because they're lawmakers, they want to pass laws.

And they see fentanyl as a particular threat.

And, you know, there's a lot of data out there that says it's a really

substantial problem for people the halt fentanyl act is moving fairly rapidly through congress

what would it do and what would it not do well first of all it's important to make listeners know that this will not in any way prohibit fentanyl.

There's licit fentanyl and then there's illicit fentanyl that's made in labs and smuggled into the country.

Fentanyl itself has been around since the 70s.

It's used very frequently in medicine. If anybody's had an anesthesia procedure, sedation for,

you know, let's say colonoscopy. There's a good chance they were given fentanyl. We use it

in their recovery room. We use it intensive care. We even make fentanyl skin patches. A brand name is called durogysic that you put on your

skin and fentanyl gets slowly absorbed over about 72 hours to reduce your requirement for

supplemental oral opioids to control your pain. So this is not affected by that. And there's another

type of fentanyl called a fentanyl analog, which is sort of modifications of the original fentanyl.

And there are a few of them that are also FDA approved and used mostly by anesthesiologists, like

su fentanyl and al-Fentanil.

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