Opioid Abuse Across the Nation

Floor Speech

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Mr. THOMPSON of Pennsylvania. Mr. Speaker, I thank the gentlewoman and my chairman from the House Education and the Workforce Committee for hosting this Special Order tonight on an issue that is impacting every ZIP Code in America.

The gentlewoman's poster says it all. This is close to home: Life beyond opioids, and stability, health, and healing.

The opioid epidemic is considered by many to be the worst public health crisis of our generation and, according to the National Institutes of Health, more than 115 people in the United States die every day from an opioid overdose.

This epidemic is not an urban problem and it is not a rural problem. It is a national problem. No ZIP Code, as I said, in the country is immune from this crisis. This is an epidemic that transcends all socioeconomic classes, and all of America's people, all of America's diversity of families is at risk.

Heroin and pain pill addiction doesn't discriminate on age, race, gender, or socioeconomic status. Your neighbor could be using heroin and so could their high honors high school student.

Unfortunately, the people of Pennsylvania have seen some of the worst. Last year, the crisis surged when Pennsylvania experienced a 44 percent increase in opioid overdoses. It is just tragic what this does to families and how it steals lives and futures.

Addressing this unprecedented rate of opioid-related death means that we must focus on nearly 2.2 million Americans who currently struggle with opioid addiction. No one person can beat addiction alone, and overcoming this epidemic will not only take a communitywide effort, but a nationwide effort.

The breadth of this epidemic requires us to respond with a multifaceted approach. Congress has engaged many agencies, including the Department of Justice, the Drug Enforcement Administration, National Institutes of Health, the Centers for Disease Control, and Customs and Border Protection, just to name a few, to help combat opioid abuse.

This crisis has torn apart families. It has weakened our workforce and overextended our healthcare system. As a nation, we must act with a unified urgency to help those who have fallen victim to addiction in every corner of the country, and we must not forget their families who have seen firsthand the crippling effects of this disease day in and day out. I know we are not only prepared to do so, but we are prepared to win this fight.

I have had the opportunity to convene opioid crisis community roundtables throughout my congressional districts to hear firsthand from families, from healthcare providers, from law enforcement, from emergency medical services, from those who are involved in the treatment community, and the impact is just so significant.

After coming away from these, I have also come to the conclusion, what is important to focus on really is the substance abuse behaviors. In one community in Clarion County, the issue at one time was opioids, and then it went to heroin. But when the heroin started to be mixed with other really deadly drugs and components, and so many people died within the user community, they moved on to the new--they went actually back to--they want to Suboxone, which is what we use to treat opioid and heroin abuse. And when the Suboxone--those who were dispensing that as treatment tightened that, the community found that they now had a crisis, they went to meth.

So it is so important, as we work on this, we keep a broader perspective of dealing with the substance abuse behaviors, because the drug of choice will change, based on economics, based on availability; but this, our goal should be to increase awareness. Our goal should be, acknowledge there is a problem, and I think we have done that.

In my work in healthcare and, specifically, I worked in acute psychiatric services for a period of time, I know that until you acknowledge you have a problem, you can't really deal with it. I think, across the board, in your communities, our States, at a local, a State, and national level, we acknowledge we have a problem, and that is an important first step.

I am proud of what we have done here in Washington, legislatively and providing funding, but this is an all-hands-on-deck problem. It requires prevention. That is where education is so important. Prevention, education, treatment.

We have to equip our youngest generation with decisionmaking skills, with discernment, so they have the filters to make better decisions when they are exposed to access, when they are approached by others, when they are preyed upon in terms of those who push drugs.

We certainly need to equip our medical professionals to improve how they prescribe, how they dispense medications, and increase their utilization of alternative pain management.

As a former rehabilitation professional, there are some great tools out there to help deal with managing pain. One of the things that, culturally, we have come to the point where we try to eliminate pain, and I think that is what has pushed us with the opioids into the situation that we are in today.

And we need to equip our communities with evidence-based treatment, something closer to home. And so I do very, very much appreciate Chairwoman Foxx's leadership on education and workforce issues, and really appreciate her putting this Special Order together this evening and leading us as we address what truly is the public health crisis of our generation.

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Mr. THOMPSON of Pennsylvania. Mr. Speaker, I appreciate the gentlewoman's leadership on this.

The fact that we had two great hearings, which were on top of a lot of the work that we have been doing as a Congress, this really is an all-hands-on-deck public health crisis, and we know that because of the work that we are doing in Education and the Workforce.

This transcends education. It impacts the workforce in a significant way at a time when we have an estimated somewhere between 5 and 6 million jobs available in this country; and we have increasing job growth, and we have an aging workforce which is retiring, a significant number each and every year.

This is an issue that impacts our national security because it takes individuals out of the workforce not able to pass that drug test, not able to be able to qualify.

This is obviously an all-hands-on-deck because we see so many different committees and their members across both sides of the aisle who have been working on this, the amount of legislation going back.

One of the more memorable ones is the CARA Act, the Comprehensive Addiction and Recovery Act, that was like 16 individual bills--16 or 18, I don't remember exactly how many--that we debated on this floor and we passed on this floor. We rolled it into one package, and it was actually passed by the Senate, and the President signed it.

It dealt with things from little unborn babies who were born addicted, a terrible situation with the suffering of those new babies because they were born to moms who were active addicts, to veterans that VA physicians--and there are some really great VA physicians. I don't want to paint them with a broad brush. But there were some that were referred to as the candy man because they dispensed the pills like Skittles is what it looked like, and their solution to everything was to medicate, and everything in between.

Also, providing resources to our local communities so our local communities could engage in this, great programs that have been around for very long time like the Drug-Free Communities moneys that are used by parents and kids and teachers and community leaders who come together to deal with and confront this epidemic in their communities.

I have a community up in Erie County, Iroquois School District, and it is a school district that has been devastated with overdoses. Most of the children in that school, a middle school--and it was heartbreaking-- either had a family member or knew someone who had died of an overdose.

Some of the stories you hear, and one that really stands out with me because I have talked with this mom who was in my congressional district, her son, unfortunately, had a disease, Crohn's disease, and had to go through some surgery as a small child and endured that rather well. It worked out well. But when this young man turned about 16, 17, 18 years old, he had to go back and do surgery as a result, and this time, the painkillers they gave him he used basically one time and his life spiraled out of control.

This was an athlete. This was a kid who did so well in school, but his life just went into almost a death spiral, and he wound up being incarcerated--and all because he wasn't wired to be able to handle these painkillers.

That is a part of this battle. We need better science. We need better medicine so we can determine who can tolerate certain medications and who cannot, whose life would be transformed in such a negative way by using a painkiller one time. But that certainly is all a part of this battle.

Mr. Speaker, once again, I thank the gentlewoman for her leadership on this and thank her for hosting this Special Order tonight.

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