Fentanyl traffickers caught in Idaho will now receive mandatory minimum sentencing that increases with the amount of the drug they are found guilty of trafficking.
On Monday, Idaho Republican Gov. Brad Little established the latest crack-down on fentanyl when he signed House Bill 406 into law, reports FOX 12.
Like all of Idaho’s drug trafficking laws, HB 406 categorizes someone as a trafficker based on the amount of drugs in their possession “rather than on whether or not they intended to distribute the drug to others,” Breitbart News reported after the bill passed the House on January 29.
Methamphetamine, heroin, cocaine, and marijuana all have mandatory minimum penalties in the state, so fentanyl is just the latest to be added to the list as the opioid crisis grows.
Once the law takes effect on July 1, those who are convicted of trafficking four or more grams of fentanyl will serve at least three years in prison.
Between 14 and 27 grams lands criminals in prison for five years, and more than 28 grams comes with a decade-long sentence.
The new legislation will also create the crime of “drug-induced homicide” for dealers who cause fatal overdoses to get hit with even more felony charges.
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C-SPANIdaho has seen a dangerous increase in fentanyl overdoses, with the state’s Department of Health and Welfare finding that the rate of fentanyl-related deaths tripled from 2020 to 2022.
The bill’s success comes with the release of Blood Money: Why the Powerful Turn a Blind Eye While China Kills Americans by Breitbart News Senior Contributor Peter Schweizer.
The seven-time New York Times bestselling author wrote the book to expose the ties between Chinese dictator Xi Jinping and criminal organizations pushing fentanyl on Americans as a form of “war.”
During conservative commentator Mark Levin’s latest show, Schweizer explained China’s strategy.
When you look at the, the plague of drugs, fentanyl, the leading cause of death of people under the age of 45, most people don’t know that they’re even taking fentanyl, and when they talk about it on the news, Mark, they say, ‘Oh, the Mexican cartels are doing this. They’re doing that.’ They are. But they were set up to do it, and they are being helped to do it by the Chinese government.
“This is part of a deliberate strategy,” he said.
