While Michigan Senate hopeful Abdul El-Sayed (D) has charged that his opponent, Rep. Mike Rogers (R), “helped to architect the opioid epidemic,” his own past statements on drug policy are raising eyebrows.

In a podcast published on June 27, 2023, El-Sayed described laws against dealing fentanyl as “draconian”:

“While claiming to be fighting fentanyl, the conservative response has amounted to doing one of two things: blaming the influx of fentanyl on the southern border or passing draconian anti-fentanyl laws designed to punish dealers and deter use. These bills were proposed in 46 of 50 states. Virginia codified fentanyl as a ‘weapon of terrorism.’ Thirty states have a drug-induced-homicide statute on the books. Look, fentanyl is a scourge. There’s no doubt about it. And we absolutely need to protect unsuspecting people from it. But the question is, does the law-and-order, throw-the-book-at-them approach actually work?”

El-Sayed’s basic argument is that criminal laws against drug trafficking have not eliminated drug trafficking, so America should try a different approach. But his outrageous abuse of the word “draconian” betrays a sharp bias against all tough-on-crime approaches.

El-Sayed uses the word “draconian” to mean “too harsh,” in a sense that applies at any degree. That is not what the word means. The term “draconian” hearkens back to an ancient Athenian aristocrat tasked with writing the city-state’s first legal code in the 7th century B.C., likely while King Josiah ruled in Jerusalem.

The laws of Draco were excessively severe — that much is true — so harsh that the Athenians begged another man, Solon, to rewrite them a quarter century later.

As the ancient historian Plutarch described Draco’s laws, “one penalty was assigned to almost all transgressions, namely death, so that even those convicted of idleness were put to death, and those who stole salad or fruit received the same punishment as those who committed sacrilege or murder.”

Plutarch continued, “Draco himself, they say, being asked why he made death the penalty for most offences, replied that in his opinion the lesser ones deserved it, and for the greater ones no heavier penalty could be found.”

Comparing these capital punishments for minor crimes to the U.S. fentanyl sentencing, the contrast is immediately apparent. According to the U.S. Sentencing Commission, there were 3,605 fentanyl trafficking offenses in fiscal year 2025. The “median base offense level” corresponded to “between 400 grams and 1.2 kilograms of fentanyl,” and the average sentence was 79 months, or nearly six-and-a-half years.

No one was sentenced to death for dealing fentanyl. No one was sentenced to lose a hand or ear. In fact, no one was sentenced to the “cruel and unusual punishments” forbidden under the Eighth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution. No one dealing fentanyl received a “draconian sentence,” unless several years in prison is considered “too harsh” for a person illegally selling a dangerous substance that results in tens of thousands of annual deaths in the U.S.

Apparently, this remark was neither the first nor last time El-Sayed criticized America’s anti-drug policies. On December 20, 2022, El-Sayed endorsed creating dedicated spaces for drug users to get high:

“The other important part of this, though, is making sure that there are spaces where people can use in an observed manner. You know, the challenge is that in a world where we criminalize drug use, people will hide their drug use. And if they hide, that’s what creates the risk of potentially overdosing in a situation where no one sees you and potentially dying. And so, one of the things that we have to think about is, how do we create spaces where people can use safely? And I know folks out there might be thinking, ‘Well, aren’t you empowering people to use drugs?’ Well, what you’re doing is empowering them not to die because of the disease of addiction.”

This is a “one step forward, two steps back” play. Monitored drug use sites might result in faster responses that save some people who overdose. But it will also encourage more people to partake in the dangerous drugs. And there is no guarantee that “open” drug use will mean “monitored” or “regulated” drug use.

On this point, San Francisco serves as a cautionary tale. Its open-air drug markets — not legal, but allowed to operate freely for years — grew so large that they became a public menace to passers-by. Even now that city officials have recognized the problem, they have not been able to shut it down completely.

Good public policy does more than look at immediate effects. It also assesses the incentives created. El-Sayed’s policy suggestions create incentives for further fentanyl abuse.

The reason stems from his worldview, which is revealed in his last comment about “the disease of addiction.” Drugs like fentanyl do have addictive qualities, and addiction does create physiological enslavement to certain behaviors. But El-Sayed seems to define away the moral dimension, overlooking the possibility that some people are deterred from pursuing hard drugs because of laws against them.

This is a feature of the Enlightenment view of human nature, shared by everything from liberalism to secularism to Marxism, which views human nature as essentially good, apart from the corrupting influences of society. Thus, it turns addiction into a “disease,” so that we should merely mitigate the symptoms rather than strike at the root.

By contrast, anti-drug laws recognize that the opioid epidemic has both a supply and a demand issue because human nature is fundamentally flawed. Christians have the best explanation for why human nature is flawed: sin. We recognize that no policy will ever make the world perfect, but we know that coddling drug addiction will only make it worse.