Editor’s Note: The following article was originally published by Kayla Robbins on Invisible People on May 1st, 2025.
New Laws Won’t Curb Fentanyl—But They Will Put Homeless Lives at Greater Risk
The HALT Fentanyl Act has now made its way through Congress, being passed with a Senate vote of 84-16 last month. This bill permanently reclassifies all “fentanyl-related substances” as Schedule I under the Controlled Substances Act, making them subject to mandatory minimum sentencing requirements. This means people caught with even trace amounts of certain fentanyl analogs could face lengthy prison sentences, even if those substances aren’t dangerous.
While this may seem like a tough-on-crime win, history suggests it will do more harm than good for vulnerable populations.
Crackdowns Continue Despite Historic Failures
Advocates have pushed back against this bill every step of the way, and they won’t stop now. A clear-eyed look at the history of drug crackdowns in this country shows us that this one is doomed to fail as all the others have. Maritza Perez Medina, Director of the Office of Federal Affairs at the Drug Policy Alliance, has this to say about the new law:
“History has shown us time and again, this only creates further harm. Increasing criminal penalties and expanding the use of mandatory minimums, as this bill does, has never reduced the supply or demand of illicit drugs. Instead, it only exacerbates racial disparities in the criminal legal system and creates the conditions for an even more unknown, and more potent, drug supply to flourish.”
Medina is not alone in that assessment. Over the 6 decades America has been embroiled in its war on drugs, few battles have been won. Prisons have been filled and overfilled with drug offenders, overwhelmingly sourced from Black and Latino communities due to selective overpolicing of those communities. People who use drugs are stigmatized to the point of receiving lower-quality medical care or being too afraid of legal ramifications to seek care at all, putting their lives at risk. Harvard researchers recently found that overdose rates actually increase in the wake of police drug busts as people turn to riskier new suppliers. And people still use drugs.
If the goal is to save lives, laws like these are counterproductive. Harsh punishments aren’t effective solutions for people who need support. Crackdowns like the HALT Fentanyl Act are hurting us, not helping us. But despite their negative effects on society, many people are still in favor of using drug laws.
Heightened Penalties Harm Homeless
Many Americans use drugs in the privacy of their own homes. By some surveys, up to half of all Americans age 12 and over have used illicit drugs at least once in their lives. But more and more Americans are living without housing, and some of those people will be people who use drugs already, while others will turn to drugs as a way of coping with the demands of homelessness. Since safe, designated places to take drugs are few and far between, and private spaces have been made inaccessible to them, these people will likely end up using drugs in public places.
This makes unsheltered people much more vulnerable to these increased punishments than housed people. Being out in the open makes them more subject to police scrutiny, searches, and seizures. These increased penalties will disproportionately affect unhoused people who use drugs, particularly Black unhoused people, while doing little to address addiction overall.
Schedule I Slows Research
Another consequence of this classification is that research into the potential medical uses of fentanyl and its related substances will become more difficult. Though the HALT Fentanyl Act makes a few minor adjustments to the registration requirements for researchers, there are still a lot of hoops to jump through.
This is significant because at least one of the handful of fentanyl-related substances that received FDA testing was found to exhibit properties similar to Naloxone, the overdose-reversing medication also known as Narcan. With the reclassification, that potentially life-saving discovery may become irrelevant. Other fentanyl-related substances tested were found to be completely harmless. Nevertheless, they now fall under Schedule I.
The Drug Enforcement Administration defines Schedule I drugs as “drugs with no currently accepted medical use and a high potential for abuse.” The category also includes such substances as marijuana, LSD, and peyote- all of which have been studied for their therapeutic effects or used in medicine for thousands of years. However, none of that has been deemed evidence enough to escape the Schedule I classification.
“Tough on Crime” is Tough on People
The neverending war on drugs has taken a real toll on the American people, and it hasn’t worked to address addiction in America. In fact, it has pushed the market to develop more dangerous, untested substances to replace those subjected to crackdowns. This is a lesson we still haven’t learned, as lawmakers give in to the knee-jerk response of banning any new substance that gains prevalence against the warnings of advocates with a good grasp on history and an eye to the future.
If there’s anything that’s become clear in the 50-plus years we’ve spent in this war on drugs, it’s that banning drugs has not stopped people from using drugs.
What it has done, however, is provide cover for law enforcement to target certain groups with a thin veneer of objectivity. Now, in an era where governors and mayors across the country are desperate to push homeless people off of their streets, it seems that the next target has been acquired.
Though its accuracy is contested, this quote attributed to John Ehrlichman, one of President Nixon’s chief advisors during the origin of the war on drugs, neatly explains the strategy as we’re seeing it play out today.
“The Nixon campaign in 1968, and the Nixon White House after that, had two enemies: the antiwar left and Black people. You understand what I’m saying? We knew we couldn’t make it illegal to be either against the war or Black, but by getting the public to associate the hippies with marijuana and Blacks with heroin, and then criminalizing both heavily, we could disrupt those communities. We could arrest their leaders, raid their homes, break up their meetings, and vilify them night after night on the evening news. Did we know we were lying about the drugs? Of course we did.”
Whether or not they knew it then, we certainly know it now. And we haven’t stopped.
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