Comprehensive Addiction and Recovery Act of 2015
Floor Speech
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Mrs. SHAHEEN. Mr. President, I wish to call up amendment No. 3345, which is my supplemental amendment to address the heroin and opioid epidemic.
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Mrs. SHAHEEN. Mr. President, I am not going to speak to this amendment right now because I hope to do it later. I spent a fair amount of time yesterday talking about the need to provide the resources to address the heroin and opioid epidemic, but I am very pleased to see my colleague from Maine on the floor to speak to it. He has been a cosponsor of the legislation and a huge advocate for addressing the challenge that Maine--like New Hampshire and so many other States--is facing from the heroin and opioid epidemic. I look forward to his remarks and to the opportunity for us to vote on this amendment later today.
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Mrs. SHAHEEN. Mr. President, I appreciate the comments from my colleague from Arkansas about the challenges of the heroin and opioid epidemic. I think it is really a pandemic that we are facing in too many States across this country. Certainly it is a huge issue in New Hampshire, my home State, where we have the highest percentage of deaths from overdoses of any State in the country.
In a few minutes, we are going to be voting on the Comprehensive Addiction and Recovery Act, which is an excellent piece of legislation, sponsored by my colleagues Sheldon Whitehouse from Rhode Island and Amy Klobuchar from Minnesota, as well as my colleague from New Hampshire, Senator Ayotte, and Senator Portman.
We are also going to be voting on a number of amendments, including an amendment that I have proposed, which is emergency supplemental funding to make sure that the changes we are making as a result of the CARA legislation actually get the resources that need to be provided in order to make those changes work.
In 2014, more than 47,000 Americans died from lethal drug overdoses. Each day, 120 Americans die from drug overdoses in New Hampshire. We are losing more than a person a day from drug overdoses--three times as many people as we lost last year in automobile accidents. These are numbers we have been using a lot on the floor of the Senate in the last couple of days, but I think they are numbers that we need to continue repeating and repeating because losing 47,000 Americans from drug overdoses is not acceptable.
Everywhere I go in New Hampshire, I am told one thing consistently by drug treatment professionals and by law enforcement, and that is, they need more resources and they need them now. Health workers are being overwhelmed. Nationwide, nearly 9 out of 10 people with substance use disorders don't receive treatment. They are being turned away. They are being denied treatment because of a chronic lack of resources.
The amendment Senator Whitehouse and I have proposed addresses this problem. It provides $300 million in emergency funding for the Substance Abuse Prevention and Treatment Block Grant Program. This is funding that will save lives in our States of New Hampshire, Rhode Island, Arkansas, and in the Presiding Officer's home State of South Carolina. This is funding that will save lives in each of our States.
Not only are health workers being overwhelmed, but law enforcement officials are also being overwhelmed. We need an infusion of new funding to mobilize additional efforts to stop opioid traffickers and drug dealers.
This emergency supplemental amendment would allocate $230 million to the Byrne JAG Program to directly combat the opioid crisis. These are efforts that will keep drugs off the streets.
In total, the Shaheen-Whitehouse amendment appropriates $600 million in emergency funding that will be immediately available to States and those working on the frontlines to address this crisis. I think that is why the National Governors Association, the Fraternal Order of Police, the American Public Health Association, the American Society of Addiction Medicine, the American Academy of Pain Management, the American College of Physicians, the National Association of State Alcohol and Drug Abuse Directors, and so many other groups support this amendment. Again, the critical point here is that this amendment funds key provisions of the CARA bill.
The Comprehensive Addiction and Recovery Act is a good bill. It is excellent work that so many people have been involved in. The sponsors did great work in writing the legislation. I support it. I am a cosponsor. But it is an authorization bill that does not provide funding. So if we support making the changes in law that are included in the CARA bill, we should also support providing emergency funding to those same programs.
To all my colleagues in this body, we know that doing the same thing is not working. Every year more and more people are dying from drug use. Congress needs to rise to this challenge, just as it has in so many previous public health emergencies, because, make no mistake about it, this is a public health emergency, and we have a history of providing supplemental funding to address public health emergencies. In 2009, Congress appropriated $2 billion in emergency funding to fight swine flu--a bill that passed the Senate 91 to 5. Many of us who voted for that are still in this body. Just last year, Congress approved $5.4 billion to combat the Ebola outbreak--an outbreak that killed just one person in the United States. Compare that to the 47,000 people we lost in 2014 to drug overdoses. Surely--surely Congress can come together now to fight this raging epidemic that is right here at home.
We can't avert our eyes from the 47,000 Americans who are killed by lethal overdoses each year. We can't accept that 9 out of 10 Americans with substance use disorders don't get treatment. We can't ignore the fact that law enforcement officers in communities across this country are overwhelmed by aggressive drug traffickers and a rising tide of opioid-related crimes. The $600 million emergency funding in the amendment I am proposing will help stem the tide. It will make a powerful difference in communities all across America.
CARA is important legislation. I intend to vote for it. I hope this body will pass it. But I urge my colleagues to also support the amendment that makes sure we have the urgent emergency funding to ramp up this fight in the months immediately ahead. Passing CARA without any funding is like offering a life preserver to people who are drowning and not putting air in that life preserver. This is a nationwide crisis. It is way past time we mobilized a nationwide response that is equal to the challenge.
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Mrs. SHAHEEN. Mr. President, we are voting on very good legislation with the Comprehensive Addiction and Recovery Act. This is a way to expand programs that work to address what is a real pandemic of heroin and opioid abuse in this country. But the reality is that unless we provide the resources to make these programs work, it is like giving a drowning person a life preserver that has no air in it. It doesn't make a difference. We are losing 47,000 people a year--120 people a day--to overdoses. Our law enforcement needs additional funding. The substance abuse treatment folks need additional support.
What my emergency supplemental amendment would do is to support the programs that are in the CARA legislation. It is about equally divided between support for law enforcement and support for treatment. It helps with prescription drug monitoring, with education, and with recovery. It is the kind of support we need to provide if we are really going to make a difference in this epidemic we are all facing.
I urge my colleagues to not just support the underlying legislation-- that is good and we should support it, but unless we provide the funding, we will not have done what we need to to accomplish real change to keep people from dying. I urge all of my colleagues to support this amendment.
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Mrs. SHAHEEN. Mr. President, do I have any time left to speak under the previous 2 minutes?
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Mrs. SHAHEEN. Mr. President, I appreciate the comments from my colleague from Rhode Island, who is the author of the Comprehensive Addiction and Recovery Act. That is the underlying bill we were trying to amend.
I would just point out that despite what the honorable chairman of the Budget Committee said, the fact is that the emergency supplemental funding amendment we introduced is very specific about where the funding goes. It goes to programs that are addressed in CARA, expanded, and improved; the substance abuse prevention and treatment block grants that go to the States to be distributed, funding the law enforcement through the Byrne-JAG and COPS grants that are very specific in how they can be used to fight heroin and opioid abuse.
Like my colleague, I am disappointed--not surprised but disappointed. I very much appreciate those people who voted for this amendment, who were willing--particularly some of my colleagues from the other side of the aisle--who were willing to step forward and say, if we are going to address this problem, we have to provide the resources that communities, that States need to fight this addiction.
The question I have for those people who didn't vote to support this amendment is, How many more people have to die before we are willing to provide the resources that are needed to fight this epidemic--47,000 people in 2014. In New Hampshire, we are losing more than a person a day. In 2015, we lost over 400 people to overdose deaths from opioid and heroin, three times as many people as we lost in traffic accidents. So many communities will continue to be ravaged because we are not willing to commit the resources to tackle this pandemic.
What do we tell the families of those people who have overdosed? What do we tell the parents of young people such as Courtney Griffin, whose father came and testified at a hearing Senator Ayotte and I had last fall in New Hampshire. He talked about the difficulties of getting Courtney treatment before she overdosed and died.
I met a man at a treatment center in Lebanon, NH, a man in recovery who had been in and out of prison. I thought he put it very well when he said: You know, it costs about $35,000 a year to keep somebody in prison. Wouldn't it make more sense to put dollars into treatment because it is a whole lot less expensive to provide the funding to treat people who are using opioids and heroin, who are substance abusers, than to put them in jail?
To all of my colleagues, I am disappointed, but I am not defeated. The fact is, this is coming back. It will come back in the appropriations process, and it will come back at every opportunity because I am not going to quit on those families in New Hampshire who need help. I am not going to quit on the treatment professionals who are trying to provide treatment for the people who are in need. I am not going to quit on the law enforcement, the police officers, the sheriffs, and all of the people in law enforcement in New Hampshire who are trying to put pushers behind bars and trying to get people off the streets and into treatment.
I hope at some point the rest of the Members of this body are willing to take up this cause and provide the resources people need because I will tell you it is certainly worth it to address the 47,000 people we lost. We were willing to put $5.4 billion into Ebola, and we lost one person in America. We were willing to put $2 billion into fighting swine flu, and we lost about 12,000 people in the swine flu epidemic. We have not been willing to put funding in to address the thousands, the tens of thousands of people we are losing each year in this country.
So we are going to keep at it. We are going to keep fighting until we get the resources that families and communities need to fight this scourge.
I yield to my colleague from Maine, who has been--like my colleague from Rhode Island--a real leader in trying to address this issue.
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