Motion to Go to Conference on S. Comprehensive Addiction and Recovery Act

Floor Speech

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Mr. HIMES. Mr. Speaker, I am delighted to join my colleague from Connecticut (Ms. Esty) in supporting this motion to instruct because this is an issue that deserves not just the attention and the focus of the House, but it deserves a meaningful commitment of resources to address the problem that is plaguing every town and city in Connecticut and in this country.

Mr. Speaker, this year we will see 30,000 fatalities to this opioid crisis. In the 20 years of the Vietnam war, from 1955 to 1975, this Nation suffered just shy of 60,000 fatalities in the entire Vietnam war. In 2 years, the opioid crisis will claim more Americans than died in the Vietnam war; yet, we this week--and I salute the majority for acting on the opioid crisis--decided to make roughly $106 million available to this scourge.

For those watching at home, we didn't actually make that money available. In Congress, we authorize--which says, legally, you can spend the money--and we appropriate. Appropriate is actually when we take out the checkbook and write the check. And just to be clear for the American people, we authorized, but we did not appropriate.

So, again, I salute the majority and I salute the bipartisan tenor that we have had this week in addressing this very, very serious problem through so many bills, but now is the time to actually put our money where our mouths are. The reason for this is the number I gave you earlier: 30,000 Americans every single year.

I spoke earlier this week about a young man from my district named Alex Recupido, a 2010 graduate of Trumbull High School. He was a young man and was on his way to becoming a nurse.

He had moved to Florida to pursue that career when, in 2014, he fell prey to a heroin overdose that, like so many of these things, started with the abuse of prescription opioids and moved into a heroin addiction and then, of course, a tragic end, as so many Americans have experienced. There were 415 in my small State of Connecticut.

I had the opportunity to speak to Alex's mom this week. Like so many of these cases, there were any number of steps along the way where this horrible outcome could have been prevented. People knew that he had a problem, but nothing happened with treatment and recovery to stop the outcome of this young man dying in Florida in 2014.

Thirty thousand is a big and abstract number, but I wish you could have heard Alex Recupido's mom, who has now devoted her life to working and advocating for us to do our jobs to commit the resources we need to commit to address this opioid crisis in this country.

I wish you could have heard her. If you had heard her, we would probably be working through the night tonight to make sure that we adequately address this unbelievable problem.

This is really about treatment and recovery. It is about training our first responders. And let's face it. We can use a lot of words and we can talk about money, but until we write the checks to help our States and our municipalities and our treatment organizations and recovery organizations to actually make a difference on the ground, we are just talking.

I salute that. And I do salute the majority for devoting this week to these really, really important bills. But I also hope that we can do better than talking about $106 million and, through this motion to instruct, actually put the resources that we need on the table to try to stop those 30,000 deaths that are going to occur this year unless we act in a meaningful way.

So again I salute the majority for prioritizing this week, and I thank my colleague, Elizabeth Esty, for offering this motion to instruct. I hope we can get behind it and I hope we can actually do something good for an awful lot of tragic outcomes that will happen otherwise.

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