Comprehensive Addiction and Recovery Act of 2015--Motion to Proceed

Floor Speech

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Mr. CORNYN. Mr. President, yesterday the Senate unanimously voted to advance consideration of the Comprehensive Addiction and Recovery Act, commonly known as CARA, and that is because this legislation gets at a big problem. The abuse of heroin and prescription painkillers is devastating families and communities across the country, including Texas. The truth is, the problem is getting worse, not better. Deaths due to heroin and prescription drug overdoses have even surpassed car accidents as the No. 1 cause of injury-related deaths nationwide.

It is time for Congress to do something significant to address this disturbing trend. This bill is a good example of how Republicans and Democrats, working on a bipartisan basis, can zero in on a problem that is harming our Nation and work together to address it.

I am proud to cosponsor this legislation, and I look forward to continuing to work on this bill and to voting on amendments that will actually improve it. Speaking of amendments, while this bill touches on how to battle drug addiction in this country, we need to do more to cut these drugs off at the source and keep them from getting into our country in the first place.

The Senate Armed Services Committee recently heard about the supply side of this equation--this primarily goes to the heroin coming from Mexico--when they heard testimony from the Director of National Intelligence, James Clapper. In his testimony, Director Clapper talked about how Mexico has ramped up the production of heroin in response to this growing demand in the United States.

I know the Presiding Officer is also from a border State and has had frequent conversations with our Mexican counterparts. When we complain about the supply, they usually turn it on me and say: Well, what about the demand in the United States? The truth is, we have to get at both components--both the supply and demand.

In 2014, drug cartels smuggled more than a quarter of a million pounds of heroin across our borders. This was done by the same transnational criminal organizations that traffic human beings for sex or forced labor and who man the illegal immigration pipelines into our country. This is no longer a mom-and-pop operation. These are major criminal networks and organizations that will do anything for money and, of course, are happy to make money from the heroin that comes across our border.

If we are going to make significant strides in the fight against addiction and drug abuse, we need to take a critical look at where the drugs are coming from and consider the strategies we can employ to keep them from even coming onto our soil. Unfortunately, even while the production and demand of these illegal drugs have been growing, we have not done enough to combat it.

Earlier I mentioned that the U.S. Southern Command--that is the combatant command for the U.S. military that is south of Mexico and goes into Central and South America--has been given zero Navy ships to conduct counter-trafficking missions, and that is because our Navy fleet is simply too small and these resources have been diverted elsewhere to counter the growing threats around the world. It is irresponsible to ignore the transnational criminal threats in our own backyard. We need a strategy to interdict drug shipments and cut them off before they reach our shores, so I have submitted several amendments that would help focus our resources to interdict these shipments and to help stem the growing tide of illicit drugs entering the U.S. market.

One amendment would simply require the Defense Department, when it allocates funding to the States for the National Guard Counterdrug Program, to prioritize drug interdiction. More effectively using the National Guard's military capabilities to help interdict drug flows would provide a needed boost to law enforcement and counternarcotics efforts, especially on our southern border. Too often, law enforcement agencies have been left with scant resources to handle this growing problem, so this amendment would allow the National Guard to play a bigger role in drug interdiction.

Another amendment I have submitted would require the President to create a plan--a strategy, really--to increase interdiction of illegal drugs that enter across the southwest border. It would require the interdiction goal of 90 percent of those drugs, which would be a great leap forward from the current levels.

Last year, General Kelly, then the commander of Southern Command, estimated that only 15 to 20 percent of drugs bound for the United States were interdicted, just 15 percent to 20 percent. General Kelly said that, due to a lack of resources in the Southern Command, basically many times they were relegated to being observers as illegal drugs would transit across their area of operation.

Given our shortfall here, it is pretty amazing that a comprehensive plan across all relevant agencies doesn't already exist. It is shocking really. This amendment would make sure that one is created to boost the amount of drugs that we successfully interdict. It would also require the President to submit this plan to Congress so we can have a conversation between the executive branch and the legislative branch and so the American people could review it, could hold us accountable, and to make sure we are making progress on this front.

Finally, I have submitted an amendment to strengthen the High Intensity Drug Trafficking Area Program. This would help Federal, State, and local law enforcement officials use task force funding to implement a multidisciplinary heroin response strategy. This has been tested in several high-intensity drug trafficking areas with great success. This amendment would help implement this strategy nationwide, giving law enforcement additional tools to combat the growing threat of heroin from both the supply and demand side.

Mr. President, I am glad we are making some progress on this legislation. I am optimistic that we will be able to complete it this week in a bipartisan fashion, which is the only way you get these done around here. We desperately need to target the opioid epidemic happening across the Nation, and we also need to cut off as much of the supply of the cheap heroin as we can. When people can't get access to prescription drugs, too often they turn to cheap heroin, and that is why the supply issue is so important. But we need both pieces in order to make real progress and restore our communities currently plagued by addiction and drug abuse.

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