Opioid Epidemic

Floor Speech

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Mr. GRIFFITH. Mr. Speaker, I appreciate all of the work that Chairman Burgess has done on this issue. It is important that he has highlighted it and made it one of the priorities of our committee--not only our subcommittee, but our full committee.

Earlier this evening, we heard from Representatives from Kentucky and from West Virginia. When you look at the map, you will see that my congressional district, the Ninth District of Virginia, touches West Virginia, touches Kentucky, and touches North Carolina. What this means to all of us is this--and it touches Tennessee, of course. It means that, if you really worked at it, in my district, you could get to various doctors and various pharmacists in just a couple of days.

In that small corner of Virginia, you can travel into other States. You can hit five States in a single day. This is why I have been working on some language for prescription drug monitoring, where the States will be encouraged to work together to try to make sure that we are sharing information. All of the States--or most of the States now-- have such a program, but they don't always have the language down the same way.

What we have to do as one of a dozen, two dozen, or three dozen things that we are looking at in trying to help resolve this opioid crisis is that we need to make sure that we have people looking at it and making sure that those folks who are addicted and are trying to get prescriptions from different doctors and using different pharmacies are not able to do so, to make sure that our programs are working together. It is very important that we continue to work.

While I say that it is important, Mr. Speaker, I appreciate so much that Chairman Burgess is holding a roundtable tomorrow as part of our Health Subcommittee that will be bipartisan, where we are bringing in families from around the country who have suffered a loss, who have a loved one who has died. And while we are not taking any votes on the floor tomorrow, the Health Subcommittee will be meeting because this is just too important to leave Washington without hearing from these important voices, from these people who can bring to us real-life stories.

We have all heard them in our communities. We have all probably had family members who have been touched by it. But to hear from these families tomorrow, I think, is going to be very special and very poignant, and I appreciate it. I think that we all have something that we can learn.

And then, Mr. Speaker, I would like to talk about pill dumping, because we do have to take a look. We have a hearing coming up with some of the pharmacies that manufacture these opioids.

But we know that in West Virginia, they were dropping millions of pills into communities there--into Williamson, into Kermit, and into Mount Gay-Shamrock. As a result of that, those drugs not only went into West Virginia, but some of those pharmacies that were shut down eventually by the DEA were just a few miles--32 miles, 34 miles--from my district and from districts in Kentucky.

We need to find out: Why were they allowing this to happen? Why were they perhaps encouraging it to happen? We don't know the answers yet, but we are going to have a hearing on that. The Oversight and Investigations Subcommittee is looking into that matter, as well, and has already got lots of information.

We are looking at what was going on in the DEA and why they didn't use their power of an immediate suspension order. When they had the authority to do so, Mr. Speaker, it was shocking to discover that they chose, instead, to come up with a trial standard.

As opposed to a standard to stop something bad from happening immediately, they chose to have a trial standard, to have all the proof already wrapped up with a nice bow on it. As a part of that, we ended up with a lot of drug stores that continue to use a cash business for operating. Even though the DEA knew there were problems, they wanted to have expert witnesses come in in advance.

This is not acceptable. We are working with the DEA to stop that procedure and to make sure that, if there are any changes in the law that are necessary to give them more tools, they can shut down somebody quickly when they see a pattern of abuse.

Mr. Speaker, the Energy and Commerce Committee is working hard on all of these issues, and, particularly, we are working to make sure that we give the various agencies and the States the authority to help shut down this horrible, treacherous, and dangerous opioid crisis in these United States.

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