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

Floor Speech

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Mr. SCALISE. Mr. Chairman, I thank the chairman for yielding me the time and for leading on this important issue.

Mr. Chairman, I rise in strong support of my friend from Utah's amendment. As he mentioned, Mr. Chairman, you look at this crisis in our country, and I am so glad that Congress is taking a wide array of actions to address the opioid crisis in our country, because it doesn't affect just one community or another. Everybody might think ``mine is the only problem,'' and then you talk to other Members of Congress from around the country, and you find out they are experiencing the same kind of crisis. And it is widespread. It is killing people every single day.

But as we are talking about on this amendment, Mr. Chairman, we are talking about children, children that are born to a mother that is addicted to opioids.

I highlight Kemper, a young boy from my district in Slidell, Louisiana. He was born addicted to opioids because his mother, while she was pregnant, was addicted to opioids herself.

Now, I wish that this was the only time that it had happened. Fortunately for all of us, Kemper is now a healthy young boy, but he spent his first 11 days of life in the hospital fighting to beat a drug addiction that was not created, of course, on his own.

We would like to think that this might be an isolated example, but, Mr. Chairman, this example highlights something the Centers for Disease Control has noted, and that is, once every 25 minutes in America, a baby is born addicted to opioids--one every 25 minutes. That is how widespread it is just for babies that are born.

When we talk about this entire package of bills, today, H.R. 6 is going to pull together 50 different bills covering many different parts of this problem. It is an incredibly bipartisan effort. I know, Mr. Chairman, so often we hear about the partisan wrangling in Congress. Clearly, there are divided lines on some high-profile issues, but this is an issue where Republicans and Democrats have come together.

I want to thank my friends from both sides of the aisle for recognizing this problem and coming together in a bipartisan way to solve it.

This is going to give real tools to our communities so that they can combat this at every different level we are seeing, including treatment, including law enforcement to stop these deadly drugs from getting on the streets so that more babies like Kemper are not born addicted to opioids.

Mr. Chairman, I encourage all my colleagues to support this amendment and the underlying package of bills.

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