Providing for Consideration of H.R. Establishing Pain Management Best Practices Inter-Agency Task Force, and Providing for Consideration of H.R. Comprehensive Opioid Abuse Reduction Act of 2016
Floor Speech
(Mr. McGOVERN asked and was given permission to revise and extend his remarks.)
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Mr. McGOVERN. Mr. Speaker, I thank the gentleman from Georgia (Mr. Collins) for the customary 30 minutes.
I rise to speak on the rule for consideration of H.R. 5046, the Comprehensive Opioid Abuse Reduction Act, and H.R. 4641, a bill to provide for the establishment of an interagency task force to review, modify, and update best practices for pain management and prescribing pain medication, and for other purposes.
By the end of this week, the House will have taken up a total of 17 bipartisan opiate-related bills, each a critical measure to help us tackle the opioid crisis in a variety of ways as we work to end this scourge hurting so many communities across our country and costing the lives of so many all across this country.
I am pleased that the House will be considering this critical bipartisan legislation this week. But in all honesty, I am also very concerned that Republicans are not proposing the new funding that is necessary to meaningfully address the opioid crisis.
So, in addition to passing the bipartisan legislation on the floor this week, which authorizes a new grant program, we must also provide real, new resources in the form of appropriations to ensure that the initiatives in this legislation can be fully implemented.
If we don't do that, all the speeches that we will give this week will amount to empty rhetoric. We need to make sure we fund these priorities. This is an emergency.
Opiate addiction is inflicting a savage daily toll in neighborhoods across America. According to the CDC, 78 Americans die from an opiate overdose every day, and many of them are young people. In 2013, the number of heroin users was 681,000, an increase of more than 250,000 users since 2002. This crisis is affecting every region across the country and every demographic group.
I have long said that Congress must provide the meaningful resources that are needed to make a difference and save lives. Today I am pleased that we are coming together and taking action to attempt to do just that. These are important first steps.
In New England, we know all too well the terrible toll of the opiate epidemic. Having seen the damage it has done to the communities that I represent in central and western Massachusetts, tackling the opiate epidemic has long been a top priority for me.
Across Massachusetts, the number of opiate overdose deaths climbed by nearly 10 percent, up from 1,228 in 2014 to 1,379 in 2015. Once all cases are finalized by the medical officials in Massachusetts, it is estimated that there will be an additional 63 to 85 deaths for 2014 and 118 to 179 deaths in 2015.
In Worcester County alone, home to the second largest city in New England, opiate-related deaths jumped from 163 in 2014 to 177 in 2015. Looking back at the last 16 years, we can see an even bigger increase. In 2000, there were 59 opiate-related overdose deaths in Worcester County, a small fraction of the 1,289 deaths in 2015.
Most of last year's victims were between the ages of 25 and 44, in the prime of their lives with so much to live for. Many left behind families heartbroken and devastated by these senseless deaths. These families included husbands, wives, children, and so many more who loved them and desperately wanted them to get the help that they needed and to be able to live.
The opiate epidemic is even harder to cope with for those who have seen young people lose their lives to addiction. In Shrewsbury, Massachusetts, one high school principal said that, in the 11 years he has been principal, he has known of 33 students who have been active heroin addicts and 7 of them died. And in a recent forum, he learned that there had been even more that he had not known about.
Part of the problem is the stigma associated with heroin use. I think a lot of us think we know what heroin use and addiction looks like, but the reality is it can take hold of anyone, including our neighbors, our friends, and even our own family members.
However, instead of giving in to despair, communities in Massachusetts and across the country are responding to the opiate epidemic with strength and with courage. They are helping to lead grassroots State and national coalitions to raise awareness and educate people about the crisis and provide resources to help those ensnared by the addiction.
The Central Massachusetts Opiate Task Force, chaired by Worcester County District Attorney Joe Early, is a great example of this. They are working to bring greater awareness of the problem to residents. Members of the task force attend many of the coalition forums and also go into schools to talk to students directly.
The opiate task force serving Franklin County and the North Quabbin Region in Massachusetts is another example. It is co-chaired by John Merrigan, Franklin County Register of Probate; Chris Donelan, the Franklin County Sheriff; and David Sullivan, the Northwestern District Attorney.
I am so thankful for these and other task forces and coalitions in Massachusetts and across the country for coming together quickly to address this public health crisis and for their tenacity in fighting for individuals and families struggling with addiction.
Just this week I had the opportunity to join community leaders at North Brookfield High School in central Massachusetts for an event with Chris Herren, a former constituent of mine from Fall River and a former Boston Celtics player who now travels in New England and across the country to speak about his own recovery from addiction and the need for young people to stay drug free.
I am also grateful to my fellow members of the Massachusetts congressional delegation for being strong partners in this fight. Joe Kennedy is a member of the Energy and Commerce Committee and has been a leader on this issue. He is the lead Democratic sponsor of H.R. 4641. A number of amendments sponsored by Massachusetts Members were made in order last night, including several from Katherine Clark, as well as amendments from Seth Moulton, Bill Keating, and Stephen Lynch.
I also want to commend the leadership of the gentlewoman from New Hampshire (Ms. Kuster). She has been out front on this issue for a long, long time, and we appreciate her leadership.
The simple truth is that we are not going to arrest our way out of this problem. Prevention and treatment must be at the heart of our approach to tackling this epidemic. As part of the comprehensive approach called for, we must equip our young people with the skills necessary to identify constructive ways to deal with problems so that turning to drugs is never an option.
We must make every effort to ensure that treatment is available to those who seek it because it takes courage and strength to admit that you need help. I am pleased that this legislation that we are considering this week would do just that.
Mr. Speaker, I strongly support the legislation this rule makes in order, H.R. 5046. The Comprehensive Opioid Abuse Reduction Act would establish the Comprehensive Opioid Abuse Grant Program. With $103 million provided annually over 5 years, this program would help provide vital assistance to States and local agencies to fund treatment alternatives to incarceration, opioid abuse prevention, training, and education.
The program's grants could be used to train first responders in carrying and administering opioid overdose reversal drugs, support prescription drug monitoring programs, strengthen collaborations between criminal justice agencies and substance abuse systems, or for programs targeted toward juvenile opioid abuse programs.
This legislation, I think, is a commonsense, bipartisan step that goes a long way toward providing the critical help that Americans across this country need to combat our opioid epidemic.
I also support H.R. 4641, a bill that would provide for the establishment of an interagency task force to review, modify, and update best practices for pain management and prescribing pain medication, and for other purposes. Creating this task force is another key step to help strengthen our national response to the opioid crisis and increase interagency collaboration as we marshal all our resources in this fight.
I want to thank my colleagues on both sides of the aisle who worked very hard to bring this additional bipartisan legislation to the floor this week so we could begin to tackle this opioid crisis. These bills take important steps to cut the risk of opioid addiction among veterans managing chronic pain, take on international drug traffickers, improve the treatment and care of babies who are born addicted to opioids, help reduce opioid use among young people, and strengthen access to opioid overdose reversal medication.
There are many issues that Democrats and Republicans do not see eye to eye on, but I am pleased that both parties seem to be coming together, at least on this first step, to tackle the opioid crisis. For families and communities across the country who have already lost so much and so many to this epidemic, there has never been a more important time for us to take action.
I want to thank the leaders of both parties for helping to bring these bipartisan bills to the House floor. I do believe that we can end the opioid crisis once and for all.
But again, in conclusion--and I have to stress this--we need to provide the funding to our communities that are struggling to deal with this opioid and heroin crisis. This is an emergency. That is how you have to classify this and look at it. This is an emergency. People are dying. Without providing the additional resources needed, we will not be part of the solution.
The ideas that we have compiled today that will be debated this week are all good ideas, but they won't be real ideas unless they are funded. I worry that this Congress might not be up to the challenge. We have emergencies in Flint, Michigan, with the water crisis, and we have not done what we need to do to provide emergency funding to that community. We have a growing emergency with the Zika virus, and we can't get an emergency appropriations bill to the floor here today. I think that we need to understand that this crisis has risen to the level of an emergency. We need to do what is right. We need to not only pass these bills, but we need to commit in a bipartisan way that we are going to provide the necessary funding. I hope we can do that.
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Mr. McGOVERN. I yield myself such time as I may consume.
Mr. Speaker, again, I think that every Member of this House should support the underlying legislation. There will be some good amendments offered. Unfortunately, there were a lot of good amendments that were not made in order by the Committee on Rules last night. There will be some suspensions that will come to the floor that I think deserve our support. And I am anxious to go to conference with the Senate, anxious to put a bill on the President's desk.
I don't want to spoil this bipartisan moment, but none of this means anything if we don't fund it. These aren't appropriations bills that we are dealing with. I know my colleagues on the other side of the aisle said, well, we will deal with that in the appropriations process. Well, because of the dysfunction of this place, we are not going to deal with the appropriations bills in any real way until after the election. I don't think we can wait. I think we need an emergency supplemental appropriations bill to deal right now with this crisis that has already claimed so many lives.
Let's all come together and pass these authorizing bills, but we need to do more than that. The President has requested $1.1 billion, I think, to try to help provide resources to communities to deal with this crisis. We haven't funded that. So bills that set up grant programs that we all support, initiatives that we all think are important, that is good; but if the money is not there to actually fund these and implement these programs, then we are not doing our job. I would just argue that we have waited too long. It is an emergency. We ought to do this, and we ought to have an emergency supplemental appropriations bill on the floor immediately and get relief to our communities today.
Mr. Speaker, I support all these measures that the House will consider this week; however, as I said, they can't be the final word. We have to approve additional funding to develop a comprehensive response to this epidemic, which is an emergency. I am going to ask my colleagues to defeat the previous question. If we defeat the previous question, I will offer an amendment to the rule to bring up legislation that provides $600 million in funding to address the opioid epidemic.
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Mr. McGOVERN. Kuster), a leader on this issue, to discuss our proposal.
Mr. Speaker, I think we all agree that this is a crisis and that we need to come up with solutions and we need to do something rather than just talk about it.
I support--and I think I speak for the Democrats--and we all support the bipartisan legislation that is being brought to the floor, not only the bills that are going to be considered under this rule, but many of the suspension bills that will be brought to the floor this week. I expect that they will be passed nearly unanimously.
But I think what I do have a problem with is the fact that we have funded none of these things. I have a problem with the fact that some are content to wait until the appropriations process kind of works its way through this House, which, as we all know, is not going to be probably until December.
We have already been informed that we will probably deal with an omnibus package sometime after the election. Because there is infighting within the Republican ranks here in the House in trying to come to an agreement before the election, it is just too difficult. I regret that very, very much because I don't think that we can wait until December before we actually fund some of these priorities that are in this bill.
The reason why I hope my colleagues will support the Democratic substitute is because it actually funds. It is an appropriation. It funds these priorities. It puts our money where our rhetoric is. It makes the money available now, and we know it is there and communities will know that they can depend on it.
So I think we really want to be effective in our battle against this scourge of opioids and heroin addiction that has touched every district in this country.
We have all been to too many funerals. We have all seen the heartbreak up close and personal. But if we want to do something about it, we have to not only come up with the ideas, we have to fund these ideas.
That is why I am urging that Members vote ``no'' on the previous question. It is so that we can bring a funding component to this. Let's not wait until December. This is an emergency. We should have had an emergency supplemental bill. That is not coming.
So this is a chance to put some money behind these priorities and actually fund all these great ideas that we all, in a bipartisan way, say we support.
I urge my colleagues to support all the underlying bills, but to vote ``no'' on the previous question so we can bring this appropriations bill up to actually fund them. So I urge my colleagues to vote ``no'' on the previous question and to also vote ``no'' on the rule.
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Mr. McGOVERN. Mr. Speaker, on that I demand the yeas and nays.
The yeas and nays were ordered.
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Mr. McGOVERN. Mr. Speaker, I demand a recorded vote.
A recorded vote was ordered.
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