Prescription Opioid and Heroin Epidemic Awareness Week

Floor Speech

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Ms. KLOBUCHAR. Thank you very much, and I thank Senator Markey for the work he has done and his passionate words as well as his understanding of the crisis this truly is.

I think one of the ways I can explain it in my State is, every day you turn on the news and you hear about car crashes and you hear about when there is a murder. Well, in the heart of my State, deaths from prescription drug abuse now claim the lives of more Minnesotans than homicides or car crashes. It is a crisis on the rise. According to the department of health in our State, drug overdose deaths among Minnesotans increased 11 percent from 2014 to 2015. Last year alone, 336 people in our State died from overdoses. The Twin Cities has been hit hard by this deadly trend. In Hennepin County, data shows that opioid-related deaths have increased 40 percent since 2006. But we know this is not a crisis confined to our urban areas.

I see Senator Shaheen from New Hampshire is here. This is something that has hit hard in her State in rural areas, just like in mine.

In one 7,000-person town in Minnesota, 3 young people died in just 6 months. Another three were hospitalized for heroin overdoses. We know, by the way, that heroin overdose is no longer separate from prescription drugs. In fact, four out of five heroin users got their start on prescription drugs. They got addicted because someone gave them to them, or they got them out of a medicine cabinet or they went to the emergency room and were given 30 pills and got addicted, or maybe they just went to the dentist to get a wisdom tooth fixed.

These are real stories that are happening all over the country. I was in Montevideo, MN--a smaller town--with some doctors. One of them started to cry at this event, telling the story about how a guy had seen him for back pain over and over and over. The next thing he knew, the Secret Service was in his office telling him that this person had gotten completely addicted and was making threats over the Internet on the lives of elected officials and ended up in prison. He had no idea.

At that same forum, I heard the story of a 12-year-old who was courted by a pusher--a 12-year-old. They came up to him and said: Hey, could you go check your parent's medicine cabinet? They gave him a list of drugs and sent him off. They said: If you come back with those bottles of pills, we will give you a can of beer. That is what is happening in smalltown America.

We passed a bill, the Comprehensive Addiction and Recovery Act. I was proud of the bipartisan work. I was one of the four lead sponsors on that bill. It builds on some of the work we have done to set up a framework. Senator Cornyn and I passed one of the first bills in this area, the drug take-back bill, which allows for drug take-backs in a way that we are now starting to see across the Nation. We were already seeing them, of course, in police departments and public facilities, but this makes it easier for drugstores and pharmacies to take back drugs. Walgreens has announced they are going to be doing this on a national basis. It also makes it easier for long-term care facilities.

Those things are beginning, but we can't end there, not when on one recent National Prescription Drug Take Back Day back in April, over 445 tons of unused drugs were collected. That is 1 day in this country, to give a sense of how many are out there. In the CARA bill, we made it easier to do drug take-backs.

We also increased the availability of naloxone, although I will say on a sideline, Senator Markey, one problem with this is the price of naloxone has gone up 1,000 percent by the pharmaceutical company that provides it. So that is another issue we are going to have to deal with. That is, of course, for another day. But I will say that naloxone is something we know can save lives.

For me, the heart of this is trying to go after these prescription drugs at the start, to try to stop people from becoming addicted. I will get to the treatment part in a moment, but we need to stop the addiction in the first place.

Just this month, one Minnesota newspaper told the story of a man in Duluth who got prescriptions for opioid painkillers from 23 dentists and 15 emergency room physicians in just over 2 years.

Back in May, in Moorhead, I heard the story of another man--this was from a rehab counselor. This guy had filled 108 prescriptions for painkillers from more than 85 different prescribers in Minnesota and in neighboring States.

The Presiding Officer is my neighbor in South Dakota. We see people who go to South Dakota, North Dakota, Minnesota, Iowa, and Wisconsin in search of different doctors whom they can basically dupe into giving them prescriptions because they are addicts. That should not be happening. Doctors should not be giving out these prescriptions. That is why I have introduced a new bill that would require doctors and pharmacies to immediately report when they give out these prescriptions and require physicians to check this list. Many States have these programs in place--prescription drug monitoring programs--but they are voluntary. Not everyone does them. Some States, such as Florida, don't even share their data with the rest of the country. I truly believe the doctors and pharmacists on the frontlines--if they check these, we are going to stop people from getting addicted and get them into treatment the way we should.

That leads me to the next piece, which is treatment itself. I have had many people tell me that they are better off committing a felony to get treatment. Why is that? Well, a lot of States, like mine, have good drug courts, and if you can get into the right program in the drug court, you are going to get treatment and followup and you are going to get the help you need. But a lot of insurance policies are not covering it. There is not treatment available. That is why I support Senator Manchin, and I am an original cosponsor of the LifeBOAT Act, which basically places a 1-cent fee on each milligram of active opioid ingredient in a prescription pain pill. That is one good way to pay for treatment, as well as, of course, Senator Shaheen's strong bill that appropriates emergency funding to address the drug abuse epidemic with treatment.

We have to remember that only 1 in 10 people who suffer from opioid addiction actually receives the treatment they need.

My State is a big believer in treatment. We use treatment a lot for low-level offenses. We use drug courts a lot. It is one of the reasons we have been able to keep our crime rate at a decent level compared to a lot of other States. That does not mean there is not horrific crime, but we have really focused on treatment.

In my own life, my dad is an alcoholic. He is sober now and happily married at age 88. He stopped drinking a while back, but he would not have done it without treatment. And that was after three DWIs and a lot of difficulty, but he got through it. From seeing that, seeing my dad climb the highest mountain but fall to the lowest valleys, I believe there is redemption and there is hope. But I don't think that treatment should be limited to just the people who have good insurance or can afford it.

We in this country have created this crisis. Let's be clear. Decisions were made at pharmaceutical companies and everywhere across the country to expand the use of opioids, to tell people they can take 30 pills when maybe they need 1 or none or maybe 2 or 3. These are bad decisions. They were made, and people were duped and they got addicted. The least we can do is give them the treatment so they can get off of it, and then make sure their kids don't get addicted as well.

This is a serious epidemic, and it calls for serious action as well as funding.

I say thank you, to Senator Markey.

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