National Defense Authorization Act for Fiscal Year 2018 -- Motion to Proceed

Floor Speech

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Mr. KING. Mr. President, first I want to join the Democratic leader in his comments about the devastation of these hurricanes. This has been truly a malign visitation on our country over the last several weeks. Florida, Texas, the Virgin Islands, and Puerto Rico have really suffered and are suffering. I know that the administration is working hard on this, and I commend them for the efforts that they have made.

I think that now much of our attention is turning to Puerto Rico and the Virgin Islands in order to mitigate what is really a humanitarian disaster. One difference between those islands and Florida and Texas is the fact that they are islands. It is harder to get there. It is harder to get aid there. I understand that just this morning the San Juan airport was open for the first time, and it has opened in a limited way.

So this is clearly a responsibility that we have as Senators, as Members of Congress, and as Americans to reach out to our neighbors in a situation such as this. When a crisis hits, it often calls forth the best of America, and I believe that is happening right now.

Opioid Epidemic

Mr. President, I want to talk about a different kind of hurricane, a slow-motion hurricane. It is a slow-motion hurricane that is sweeping our entire country, not just the Southeast. It is sweeping through our small towns, our cities, our families, and our schools. It is taking lives on a scale that is unprecedented and almost unthinkable.

I am talking about the hurricane epidemic of opioid abuse and overdose deaths. Many of us this week are watching with rapt attention Ken Burns' magnificent study of the Vietnam war. We are losing more people per year to overdose deaths than were lost in the entire Vietnam war. That is one way to think about the magnitude of this catastrophe that is striking our country. The problem is that it strikes

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here and there. It strikes a family here and a family there, a community here and a community there, but it doesn't strike all in one place. So it is not so apparent.

If we were losing a small city in America of 63,000 people once a year, we would be turning ourselves inside out to solve the problem that was causing those deaths, and 63,000 people were killed last year through overdose deaths. It was almost 400 in my State of Maine. That is more than one a day. All indications are that it is increasing--one a day. Now, 63,000 is about 7 people an hour--24 hours a day, 365 days a year--who are succumbing to this plague. That is the right term for it. It is a medieval plague that is afflicting people all over our country.

Lives are lost, families torn apart, and our communities compromised.

It is a huge cost. I hesitate to talk about things like dollars when you are also talking about lives, but it is a cost in both ways. Not only are lives being lost and families being torn apart, but the estimates are that it costs our society something over $400 billion a year in everything from medical costs and criminal justice costs to lost economic and lost productivity in our society and our economy.

But I am here today because all hope is not lost. Contrary to what some people hear--and you hear sometimes that this is hopeless and that there isn't anything we can do about it--there is ample evidence that treatment can work. This is not a death sentence. Opioid abuse is terrible, and from talking to people who have suffered from it, it literally changes your brain, and it becomes almost impossible to escape. But it can be escaped. The reason we know that is that there is data from across the country, but the reason I know that is because of my friends in Maine--Andrew, Matt, and Chris.

These are people whom I know, with whom I have interacted, and with whom I have sat down. Andrew is a guy who is at the University of Southern Maine. He was trapped in the throes of addiction. He went through treatment, and now he is in recovery. Indeed, there are 25 million people in this country who are in recovery, and they will tell you that they will always be in recovery because they can never shake this disease, whether it is alcohol or the really destructive one that we are focusing on right now, which is opioids.

Andrew has made a new life. He is at school. He is at the University of Southern Maine. He has helped form a student-centered community to help people who are in recovery or who are working on getting there.
Matthew is a young man who, in 2009, again was trapped by this horrible scourge. Now he is hoping to go to medical school.

Chris is a guy who sat in my office. He worked in the White House. He was in it up to his neck and above. He had criminal justice problems.

He was in jail. He was convicted. But now he is a member of the Maine State Bar Association. He got himself through school, and he got himself through law school.

There was an important moment that I think all of us should think about when we think about people who are in this situation. When he went to apply to law school, the people at the law school said: Well, we don't know if we can take you because you have this record.

His question, which was brilliant and indicates to me that he is going to be a pretty good lawyer, was this: What was my sentence when I was convicted? The response was 3 years. He said: You are putting me in for life. If you don't let me move forward with my life, you are making that a life sentence, not a 3-year sentence. He was accepted to law school. He graduated, and this year he passed and was accepted in the Maine State Bar Association. He is making a contribution to his community.

Treatment can work. It doesn't always work the first time. Anybody that has been through this, whether it is alcohol or even quitting smoking or anything else, will tell you that it doesn't work the first time necessarily. Sometimes it does, and sometimes it doesn't.

Sometimes it will take multiple trips through the recovery and treatment process, but it can work. We know it can work. I have 25 million reasons to tell you that it can work and 3 that I know.

I am going to be introducing a resolution later today--I hope the Senate can take it up and pass it--designating next month as National Recovery Month, honoring and recognizing the people who are in recovery. So if it works, what is the problem? Why is this hurricane still sweeping our country? Why does 2017 look like it is going to be worse than 2016?

Well, the sad truth is that, out of all of those millions of people who are addicted, who are stuck, who are trapped, only 1 in 10 has access to treatment--only 1 in 10. Now, what do we have to do to deal with this problem? Of course, it is like most other problems. There is no single answer. It involves law enforcement. It involves interdiction, and let me pause for a moment on interdiction. The Presiding Officer and I are both on the Armed Services Committee, and we have heard testimony in our committee that we only have the Coast Guard and Navy resources to interdict one-fourth of the drug shipments that we know of coming up from South and Central America by sea. In other words, we have intelligence where we know of 100 boats, and we can only stop 25. There is no excuse for that. So, yes, law enforcement, at the source or along the way in our States, is an absolutely essential part of this process, but it is not the whole answer. We also have to work on prevention.

Frankly, I have been talking to groups around Maine and around the country on this. We are all still trying to figure out how to make prevention work. What will work? I haven't yet heard a really strong answer to that question. I guess it varies from person to person, but prevention has to be part of it. Treatment can work, but if only 1 in 10 people have treatment available to them or have access to treatment, that means 9 are sentenced to life and maybe to death.

Last year, a year and a half ago, we passed CARA, the Comprehensive Addiction Recovery Act. It is a great bill, with lots of good things in it, but no money. That is like sending the fire department to the fire and saying: Fight that fire, but we are not going to give you any water. We know this costs money, and it is something we have to commit to. It has to be part of it.

Whatever we do around here about healthcare and about budgets, we have to realize we are losing our people, and these aren't bad people.

These aren't people over there. I sat at a roundtable in a small town in South Paris, ME. Next to me was a deputy sheriff. He lost his daughter. These aren't strangers. These are often middle-class people.

These are people whose kids or sometimes parents--this is not age specific--are caught up in this scourge.
I guess I want to leave us today with two points. One is, treatment works. The second is, we need more of it. If we know something works, but only 1 in 10 people have access to it, shame on us for not remedying that situation. To me, the most tragic case--and I have talked to people in Maine about this--the saddest moment, the most tragic case is when someone who is in the throes of opioid abuse is ready to ask for help and they have to be put on a waiting list. That is tragic and inexcusable. It is hard to get to that point. It is hard to admit that you are trapped and that you are no longer in control of your life. Once you are willing to do that and say, ``I need help,'' then it is up to us to be sure the help is there. That is what we are talking about today.

So this is a different kind of hurricane, but it is a hurricane, nonetheless, that is destroying our families, destroying our communities, and wrecking the lives of our friends, but it is no act of God. We can't stop the winds of Maria or Irma, but we can mitigate the effects, ameliorate the effects, soften the effects. That is exactly what we need to do for those who are victims of the hurricane of opioids that is sweeping our country.

I hope and believe we will respond to this challenge as we have at other times in our history, and, indeed, as we are this week to the hurricanes of the Caribbean. I want to respond also to the hurricane that is sweeping America that we can, indeed, ameliorate, mitigate, and soften.

Thank you, Mr. President.

I yield the floor.

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