OFFICIALS LEGISLATION INTEREST GROUPS PUBLIC STATEMENTS COMMITTEES VETOES

Substance Use-Disorder Prevention That Promotes Opioid Recovery and Treatment for Patients and Communities Act

Floor Speech

By: Neal Dunn
By: Neal Dunn
Date: June 22, 2018
Location: Washington, DC
Issues: Drugs

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Mr. DUNN. Mr. Chair, I rise in support of my amendment to H.R. 6. I am grateful for the opportunity to speak about it.

My amendment strikes language that would expand the classes of healthcare workers who would be authorized to dispense narcotics for narcotic treatment.

Let me be clear at the outset. H.R. 6 is, in large part, a great bill; however, as currently written, it allows nurse specialists, nurse midwives, and nurse anesthetists to prescribe buprenorphine. I believe this is a significant and impulsive expansion of prescribing authority.

Allowing more providers with less clinical experience to provide buprenorphine, a highly addictive opioid, opens up dangerous new potential for increased opioid abuse. The point of H.R. 6 is to decrease opioid abuse, but this provision increases the potential for abuse and vastly increases the supply of a dangerous opioid that is one of the major causes of opioid overdose and death in Europe.

Mr. Chair, I appreciate the opportunity to bring these concerns to light in this amendment.

Mr. Chair, I include in the Record a letter in support of my amendment from The OTP Consortium.

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Mr. DUNN. Mr. Chair, I yield 1 minute to the gentleman from Tennessee (Mr. Roe), the chairman of the Veterans' Affairs Committee.

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Mr. DUNN. I yield the gentleman an additional 1 minute.

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Mr. DUNN. Mr. Chairman, I yield 1 minute to the gentleman from Kansas (Mr. Marshall).

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Mr. DUNN. Mr. Chair, buprenorphine was introduced in Finland in 1997, and now it has become the most widely-abused opioid in that country. Buprenorphine can kill people. It does kill people. And office-based practices involving merely prescribing buprenorphine run a large risk of harming patients, not helping them to recover.

In closing, I want to thank you for working with me on this amendment, and I thank Chairman Walden for his gracious commitment to continue to examine.

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