White House attempts to reach a middle ground on how to confront the still-raging opioid epidemic have drawn fire from across the ideological spectrum, with progressives charging President Joe Biden with continuing a failed drug war and some conservatives arguing he is soft on drug traffickers. But the plan may still find a congressional sweet spot.

At issue is the White House Office of National Drug Control Policys recommendation to permanently criminalize fentanyl, a synthetic opioid that played a major role in driving a 30% increase in drug overdose deaths in 2020, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. The overdose death toll increase to over 93,000 is one of the largest in American history.

Starting in 2018, an emergency order classified fentanyl and its analogs a wide variety of drugs with similar chemical structures under Schedule I, a category for substances like heroin and LSD with no accepted medical use. That order, set to expire in May, was extended by Congress until October.

But that extension infuriated some progressives, who pointed out that fentanyl had long been prescribed by doctors as a painkiller . They argued the administration was continuing the policies of a failed drug war.

At the time, the White House said it would work to address progressive concerns.

The Office of National Drug Controls proposal, released earlier this month, aimed for a compromise: It would permanently classify fentanyl as a Schedule I drug a major request of both moderate Democrats and Republicans but would exempt nonviolent offenders from mandatory minimum sentencing requirements that typically go along with the designation. It would also change the rules to allow for more research of Schedule I drugs, which the administration said should help better understand and prevent overdoses and addiction.

The proposal immediately came under fire from both polarized ends of the ideological spectrum. Arkansas GOP Sen. Tom Cotton said the mandatory minimum sentencing exceptions were unacceptable. A coalition of progressive and civil rights groups said it echoes the failed drug policies of our past.

It seems to be the same, old knee-jerk response to the problems around drugs in this country, said Jesselyn McCurdy, a top official at the Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights. After 50 years of the War of Drugs, we see that just criminalizing drug users is not working.

Those with the final say are likely to be a cadre of moderate senators hailing from states decimated by the opioid epidemic, including Sens. Joe Manchin (D-W.Va.), Maggie Hassan (D-N.H.) and Rob Portman (R-Ohio.) And they seem open to the White House proposal.

In an interview earlier this year, Hassan took aim at progressives who she thought were naive about the need to punish distributors of fentanyl and fentanyl analogs, which are increasingly mixed with more common recreational drugs.

We do need a public health approach, Hassan said. But we also need to be clear-eyed about whos driving this epidemic, whether its vicious cartels or overzealous big pharmaceutical companies who are prescribing drugs they know are addictive.