Prescription Opioid and Heroin Epidemic Awareness Week

Floor Speech

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Mrs. SHAHEEN. Mr. President, I thank my colleague from Massachusetts, who has seen the same tragedy we are seeing in New Hampshire. I am sad to have to come to the floor again today to join my colleagues, Senator Markey and Senator Klobuchar, who have spoken so passionately about our need to address the ongoing heroin and opioid crisis.

Like them and many others, I have been coming to the floor for many months to describe the terrible toll this crisis is taking on communities across the country. I know the Presiding Officer must see it in his home State because it is happening all across America.

It is ironic that we are here during Prescription Opioid and Heroin Epidemic Awareness Week to once again call on this Congress and the Senate to pass emergency funding to address what is the most pervasive, most destructive, and, I believe, most urgent public health crisis that faces this Nation.

I certainly don't want to minimize the gravity of the other health challenges we are facing in America, especially the Zika outbreak, which I believe is absolutely critical, but by any objective measure, these challenges are dwarfed by the destruction and loss of life that is being inflicted every day by the uncontrolled epidemic of heroin and opioid abuse. This epidemic is raging in all 50 States. It is an uncontrolled public health epidemic of staggering dimensions. In 2014, some 47,000 people died from drug overdoses--far more than the number of Americans who died in motor vehicle accidents the same year.

I am sad to say that New Hampshire is at the epicenter of this epidemic because we have the highest percentage of overdose deaths in the Nation. This year, at the rate we are seeing overdose fatalities, we will lose over 500 people in New Hampshire, a State of about 1.3 million. Estimates are that over 100,000 people in New Hampshire have some sort of substance abuse/misuse issue. The statistics don't even begin to describe the heartbreak and the trauma that is experienced by those who have drug misuse issues and their families. Yet, despite this appalling death toll, despite what the statistics tell us, the Senate has failed to provide emergency funding to first responders and to treatment providers on the frontlines of this crisis.

In July, Congress passed the Comprehensive Addiction and Recovery Act, CARA. I applaud Senator Klobuchar and the other sponsors of that legislation. It is a good, bipartisan bill that passed this Chamber with overwhelming support. I was a cosponsor, and I voted for it. But, as we all know very well, CARA is an authorizing bill, it is not an appropriations bill. The public may not know that because I think there is a lot of confusion about the difference between authorizing and appropriating, but the fact is, we know here in this Chamber that CARA is an authorizing bill and it does not provide one penny to fight the opioid epidemic.

We need to fund CARA. That is probably not going to happen this year and may not happen for several years. We need to put actual resources behind all of our talk about stemming this crisis. Earlier this year, I introduced emergency funding that would provide an additional $600 million for policing, prevention, treatment, and recovery. I offered this legislation as an amendment to the CARA bill but sadly it was defeated.

The legislation looks at all of those aspects: prevention, treatment, recovery, and policing because I believe there isn't one magic bullet solution for this issue.

We definitely need more treatment. We need to acknowledge that addiction is a disease. That is a critical part of it, but we also need to do the policing--the long-term recovery. I was at a recovery center in New Hampshire several weeks ago, and one of the women I met there who was in recovery said: You know, getting clean was easy. It is staying clean that is the hard part.

Our Nation has addressed our public health crises with emergency funding bills far larger than the one I proposed. In 2014, Congress passed nearly $5.4 billion--billion with a ``b''--in emergency funding to combat the Ebola outbreak in West Africa. The Ebola outbreak killed one person in America. The heroin and opioid epidemic is killing more than 128 Americans every single day.

We know treatment is the only effective answer to addiction, but people are being turned away from treatment due to lack of resources. Nationwide, in 2013, nearly 9 out of 10 people needing drug treatment did not receive it. It is the same story on the law enforcement side of the equation, a chronic lack of resources.

As Senator Klobuchar pointed out, and as my colleagues from Vermont-- who just came to the floor--and Massachusetts understand very clearly, heroin traffickers expressly target rural States and counties where law enforcement is spread too thin and lacks the resources to respond effectively.

Meanwhile, as Congress fails to act, the opioid epidemic is on the verge of expanding dramatically. Carfentanil is a synthetic opioid that is used to tranquilize elephants. It is now available on the streets, blamed for a record surge of drug overdoses in the Midwest.

Carfentanil is 100 times more potent than fentanyl, which, in turn, can be up to 50 times more deadly than heroin. It is one of the synthetic additives to heroin that is causing so many overdose deaths in New Hampshire. Until recently, Hamilton County, OH, had four to five overdoses a day. Now, because of carfentanil, the county is reporting 20 overdoses, 30 overdoses, and sometimes even 50 overdoses a day, completely overwhelming first responders.

Some public health officials say the United States has reached a disastrous inflection point in the opioid epidemic. Going forward, we may be seeing more and more synthetic opioids on the market--cheaper, more potent, more addictive, and even more deadly.

This is just one more wake-up call.

As I travel across New Hampshire and talk to Senate colleagues from across the country, again and again I hear about the lack of resources to marshal an effective, well-coordinated response. As new and more dangerous opioids hit the streets, this crisis could become exponentially worse. Our failure to act is having tragic consequences.

At long last, let's give law enforcement, let's give treatment providers, and let's give recovery centers the resources they so desperately need. At long last, let's come together. Let's pass an emergency funding bill to combat the opioid epidemic. If we can spend billions to fight Ebola on a distant continent, surely we can allocate $600 million to combat a raging epidemic right here at home.

When the Senate comes back into session after the election, we will have another opportunity to consider emergency funding to combat this crisis. For tens of thousands of Americans, this is very literally a matter of life and death.

Let's put politics aside. Let's do the job the American people sent us to do. At long last, let's give law enforcement and treatment providers on the frontlines the resources they need to effectively address the opioid crisis.

Thank you to my colleagues from Massachusetts and Minnesota for coming to the floor to once again point out the need we so desperately have.

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