1. Short title This Act may be cited as the Combatting Illicit Fentanyl Act of 2018 . 2. Findings Congress finds the following: (1) America’s overdose epidemic is spreading geographically, is increasing across all demographic groups and the sharp increase in drug overdose deaths in the United States between 2015 to 2016 was fueled by a surge in illicit fentanyl, a highly potent drug about 80 to 100 times as strong as morphine by weight and is 30 to 40 times stronger than heroin by weight, as well as fentanyl-related compound analogue overdoses. (2) Fentanyl began to appear on U.S. streets in the early 2000s, in recent years it has become a major international drug control issue as overdose deaths from its abuse continue to rise, with a spike beginning in 2013. Foreign-sourced fentanyl killed more Americans in 2016 than all other illicit drugs, and synthetic opioids such as fentanyl and tramadol accounted for more than 29,000 U.S. drug overdose deaths in 2017, according to provisional data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Illicit fentanyl is not a diverged pharmaceutical product, is illicitly manufactured, and is clandestinely distributed and integrated into the illicit drug supply, usually sold as heroin in powder form, or as counterfeit opioid or benzodiazepine pills. (3) In Ocean County, New Jersey, based on data from the Ocean County Prosecutor’s Office, in 2014 10 percent of all overdose deaths had fentanyl in their systems, and by 2018 that number had risen to 80 percent. (4) The Drug Enforcement Administration reports that of the illicit fentanyl class substances and hundreds of other designer drugs it has identified, the vast majority … are manufactured in China . In 2018, a year-long congressional probe found that illicit fentanyl could easily be bought online from Chinese labs and mailed to the United States due to gaps in oversight in the United States Postal Service, and despite increased cooperation between United States and Chinese counter-narcotics agencies, illicit fentanyl is