(The Center Square) – With thousands of Pennsylvanians dying from overdoses, Republican U.S. Senate Candidate Dave McCormick wants an aggressive policy to stop the international drug flow.
“Our great commonwealth is under siege from this fentanyl crisis— and so is America,” McCormick said at a roundtable on fentanyl in Luzerne County.
He praised the work of local officials, who argued for stiff penalties on dealers.
“It’s become almost a cliché now, we can’t arrest our way out of the problem,” Luzerne County District Attorney Sam Sanguedolce said. “On the other hand, there are people that should be blamed. This influx — it was by deliberate design to get people addicted. We need to see bigger penalties for the people that traffic in these drugs.”
The Senate candidate wants to make fentanyl a national priority, he said, and criticized President Joe Biden and U.S. Sen. Bob Casey for failed leadership. He also proposed transforming the fight beyond local and state law enforcement.
“I think these drug cartels are such a threat that we should consider also, hopefully in concert with the Mexican government, of taking limited military action to stop the cartels from pushing fentanyl across our borders,” McCormick said. “That’s something that happened to some degree in the drug wars in Colombia … the consequences of not stopping this are so large that we need to sort of break the glass in terms of the actions we would consider.”