Nuclear Weapon or Fentanyl—Both Accomplish Same Goal, Congressman Warns
Virginia Allen /
Adversaries of the U.S. could launch a nuclear weapon at America, or they can achieve the same goal by flooding the nation with fentanyl, says a congressman who has introduced a bill cracking down on fentanyl imports.
“If you’re one of our adversaries, you have the option: You can either launch a nuclear weapon that would kill half a million people, and then you have a war that we’re obviously going to get into because you nuked us, or you can do this,” Rep. Addison McDowell, R-N.C., said, referring to the trafficking of fentanyl into the U.S.
Over the past decade, roughly 500,000 U.S. lives have been lost to synthetic opioid overdoses, mainly fentanyl, according to the National Institutes of Health.
“As the, the Biden administration just let all of these criminals and drugs into our country and they weren’t doing anything about it, I wanted to do something about it,” McDowell told The Daily Signal.
“Our adversaries don’t just use the southern border, and we’re naive to think that that’s the case.”
Since President Donald Trump returned to office and took action to secure the U.S. border with Mexico, Customs and Border Protection reported a dramatic decline in the amount of fentanyl entering the U.S. The agency seized nearly half the amount of fentanyl in fiscal year 2025 as it had the previous year.
In December, Trump declared fentanyl a weapon of mass destruction.
McDowell has now served as a member of Congress for just over a year and says he would not have run for office if not for his brother Luke, who died 12 years ago from fentanyl poisoning at the age of 20.
“I decided that I wanted his legacy to continue to live on through me and through the service that I provide,” he told The Daily Signal.
Every time McDowell walks out of his office to the U.S. Capitol to cast a vote, he passes a photo of his brother Luke as a reminder of why he chose to serve in Congress.
McDowell on Wednesday introduced a bill aimed at blocking drug traffickers from bringing a tool called a pill press into the U.S.
The process of fentanyl entering the U.S. is “coordinated,” McDowell explains.
China, for example, “will ship a pill presser” to a drug dealer in the U.S. to cut “pure fentanyl,” he said, which results in “something that looks like a pill.”
McDowell’s bill, the Preventing Rogue Equipment for Synthetic Substances Act, or PRESS Act, criminalizes the “intentional importation of unlisted precursor chemicals and related equipment, including tableting machines, encapsulating machines, press punches, die systems, and gelatin capsules, that will be used to manufacture controlled substances,” according to the congressman’s office.
If, through his work in Congress, McDowell says he can save even one family from the heartache his own family has endured through Luke’s death, it will all be “worth it.”