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Prioritizing Science Over Fear: An Interdisciplinary Response to Fentanyl Analogues March 16, 2021 | Zoom The Drug Enforcement and Policy Center hosted a virtual symposium aimed at educating advocates, congressional staff, administration officials, and scholars about the possibility that classwide scheduling of fentanyl analogues will yield unintended consequences, and to highlight evidence-based alternatives that can help reduce overdose deaths. More information about the symposium can be found at u.osu.edu/fentanylanalogues. Holly Griffin is the public engagement specialist for the Drug Enforcement and Policy Center and served as MC for the event. _____ WELCOME AND OPENING REMARKS Welcome by Douglas A. Berman, Drug Enforcement and Policy Center Opening Remarks from Congressman Robert C. “Bobby” Scott (pre-recorded) TRANSCRIPT Holly Griffin: Thank you for attending today's event Prioritizing Science Over Fear: An Interdisciplinary Response to Fentanyl Analogues hosted by the Drug Enforcement and Policy Center. Before we begin, we just have a few notes we'd like to share with you. First to streamline if you're into the presentations today, we suggest that you hide non-video participants. To do that, click on the three dots at the top right corner of any participant box that has their video off and click the hide non-video participants. Second, we want to draw your attention to… I'm sorry just going to skip ahead there for a moment. Please note that auto-generated transcription has been enabled for this event. To change how you view the automated transcription or to hide it click live transcript in the menu at the bottom of your zoom window. Finally, this event is being recorded. The recording will be made available on the event page and social media channels as soon as possible after the event. Follow us @OSULawDEPC to stay up to date on our research, programming and future events. Thank you again for joining us, and I hope you enjoy the event. Professor Berman… Douglas Berman: Thank you so much Holly and welcome everybody to Prioritizing Science Over Fear. That actually could be a title for all sorts of programming, these days, but today we're talking about an interdisciplinary response to fentanyl analogues. I am Doug Berman. I am a professor at The Ohio State University Moritz College of Law. I also help run our Drug Enforcement and Policy Center. This is a fairly new center that is the nation's only law school-based criminal justice center that focuses on the war on drugs and the intersection of drug policy, public health and criminal justice. And so, we as a center were incredibly grateful and excited to have a chance to be the host of this terrific event and particularly thankful to Grant Smith and Patricia Richman for helping to put it together and DEPC’s own Jana Hrdinova and Holly Griffin for doing all the infrastructure work that makes it possible for us to be here today. My role is just to sort of set the table a bit and then get out of the way, because we have an extraordinary a group of speakers lined up and I'm very excited to hear the way they approach these issues again to prioritize science over fear, when we look at fentanyl analogues. As a little bit of a table set of course probably everybody on this Zoom knows that we're now half a century, 50 years, into the so-called modern war on drugs. Richard Nixon back in ’71 talked up the importance of fighting a war in the drug policy space, and especially in the 80s, we saw that war take on a whole new problematic front when aggressive enforcement based on a severe sentencing, mandatory minimums often front and center in an effort to battle drug issues. But now we have five decades of experience and the evidence is overwhelming: that mandatory minimum penalties don't decrease drug supply, don't decrease demand, don't decrease overdose deaths and yet still we keep fighting, despite the evidence, despite what we should have been able to learn from seeing these patterns play out throughout our criminal justice system in so many ways. We continue, it seems, to respond to drug crises with punitive responses. Policymakers are still turning to enforcement-first approaches and often without even considering, let alone integrating, the science, the evidence we've built. If we can't learn from past patterns, I don't know why we expect to do better and that's fundamentally why we're here today. We are seeking to have a conversation that connects policymakers and policy responses in the fentanyl space, particularly fentanyl analogues, where we have again signs, we have evidence and we need to build off that in order to have the right kind of response to make sure we don't repeat the mistakes of the past, yet again. The Drug Enforcement and Policy Center is particularly honored to be able to host a group of experts from across disciplines to stress what science and evidence we have, bring that to the policy conversation, make sure we don't repeat past errors, make sure we move in the right direction. And wonderfully, we've been fortunate enough to be able to have a member of Congress speak with us to get us started. I'm extraordinarily pleased and honored to be able to introduce representative Bobby Scott. He's represented Virginia's Third Congressional District in the U.S. House of Representatives since 1993. Anybody working in the criminal justice space knows that Representative Scott has long been a stalwart advocating for reform of our nation's broken criminal justice system, has worked successfully to pass bipartisan legislation to reduce emphasis on mandatory minimums and so he's absolutely the perfect speaker to get us started here today. So, with that again welcome again and Representative Scott take it over. Representative Scott: Thank you for that introduction and thank you for hosting this webinar fentanyl analogues and drug policy. The opioid crisis has taken a devastating toll on young people and communities throughout our country. As we look to address this public health crisis, it is important to take into account the lessons of the failed drug policies of the past. So-called tough on crime legislation fails to address the true causes of the opioid crisis will result in more incarceration of drug users and it will fail to target the laboratories outside the United States that are responsible for flooding our communities with fentanyl analogues. Since President Nixon declared the war on drugs, nearly 50 years ago, laws that ignore the evidence and research in favor of harsh penalties and more mandatory minimums has led the United States to be a leader in the world for incarceration. Mass incarceration has gotten so bad that studies have shown that it actually adds to crime, instead of reducing crime, because so many people can't find jobs because of a felony conviction. Too many parents are raising children while they're in prison and so much of the Department of Justice budget goes to waste it prisons where it could be put on for effective prevention programs that we know will actually reduce crime. Alternatives to sentencing such as drug treatment, safe schools, community policing and gang prevention programs are much more effective at crime reduction than increased penalties. We wasted too much money on failed policies instead of investing in intervention and prevention, things we know that can address the root causes of the opioid crisis. Illicit fentanyl from the labs that produce this dangerous substance are a clear threat to public safety. We can choose to address it as a public health crisis, or we can revert back to the failed drug policies that relied on slogans and soundbites. We have three main concerns with the class wide scheduling of fentanyl analogues. First, class wide scheduling abandons evidence and expertise in exchange for expediency. We have a process that works well for designating controlled substances under the controlled substances act. Class wide scheduling of fentanyl analogues changes a process for prosecution under the controlled substances act and allows the Department of Justice to ignore the experts at the Department of Health and Human Services and the Federal Drug Administration. Class wide scheduling would give the Drug Enforcement Agency the ability to classify any new alternative chemical version of fentanyl as a schedule I drug. This would encompass hundreds and possibly thousands of chemical compounds. Class wide scheduling also stifles research that just use some of the best weapons against the opiate the opiate crisis. Life-saving overdose treatments, such as Narcan. For example, could not have been developed underclass wide scheduling because class wide scheduling creates enormous barriers for scientists studying opioid addiction by arbitrarily limiting access to an entire class of chemical compounds. Second, classified scheduling of fentanyl analogues will add to the problem of mass incarceration. It allows for a return to the street level drug busts the late 1980s and 90s, and the bill will trigger the same mandatory minimums that have contributed to mass incarceration. Possessing an analogue substance in a quantity equivalent to the weight of one paperclip is enough to trigger a mandatory minimum sentence of at least five years. A person doesn't even have to know that the drug they're selling on the street or sharing with a friend contains an analogue substance. Class wide scheduling allows prosecutors to seek longer sentences without a mens rea requirement. Third, class wide scheduling is unnecessary.

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