Montana Attorney General Tim Fox has joined nearly all 56 of the nation’s attorneys general to ask Congress to close a loophole that allows fentanyl traffickers to avoid law enforcement. Fox describes the loophole in the statute.

“There are lots of what we call ‘analogs’, which are a derivative of fentanyl that don’t fall within the federal statutes,” said Fox. “Unfortunately, the bad guys out there have used this loophole to circumvent our efforts across the nation and indeed in Montana to try to protect our citizens from the abuse and misuse of the fentanyl analogs.”

Fox said many deaths in Montana have been attributed to fentanyl over the past two years.

“The State Crime Lab in Missoula has detected 29 post-mortem cases in 2016 that involved fentanyl that was detected and in 2017 there 15 post-mortem cases that detected fentanyl,” he said. “We’ve also had a number of people overdose. We’ve had nine individuals overdose and die in 2016 in Montana, and we had three cases of overdose deaths in 2017.”

Fox and the other attorneys general are asking Congress to pass the Stopping Overdoses of Fentanyl Analogues (SOFA) Act before the House and the Senate.

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