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Floor Speech

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Mr. MARKEY. She is on the frontline of conducting that battle against this scourge. We are both here on the floor today in an effort to find the best solutions for addressing this crisis.

We lost over 105,000 Americans to overdose last year. That is over 1 million people in a decade who have died, at that pace. And to put this in more concrete terms, we lost more Americans in a single year to overdose than in the entirety of the Vietnam war or the Korean war--in just 1 year, 105,000 people.

For every death, we unleash waves of grief and hurt on families and communities that lose one of their own. Now, 105,000 deaths is more than unacceptable; it is a tragedy. And this epidemic is made worse by the scourge of xylazine. The tragedy does call for immediate, full- scale solutions. Americans need solutions that work.

In developing those solutions, we must be conscious about any unintended consequences, and I am concerned about the unintended consequences of passing the Combating Illicit Xylazine Act.

The bill would require scheduling xylazine under the Controlled Substances Act as a schedule III drug. And these schedules are meant to create restrictions based on a balance of the substance's legitimate medical use and their potential for abuse. It is a balance. And in the United States we actually have a process to schedule xylazine and other drugs. We have a process that is time tested, that requires the Department of Health and Human Services to provide a scientific and medical evaluation.

And as the Drug Enforcement Administration, the DEA, has indicated, they have already started that process. So instead of waiting for the scientific and medical evaluation to be completed, this bill would actually require we skip the process and let Congress decide what scheduling is the most appropriate.

But, ultimately, this process is something which I believe has to be given due respect. If we schedule this without waiting for the experts, this could lead to more people struggling with addiction, having a hard time asking for help, and less research into xylazine testing, overdose reversal, and treatment.

So, from my perspective, I just don't think we should be skipping over expert recommendations that would help us avoid those unintended consequences. And efforts to skip medical and scientific evaluation should certainly not be supported by the DEA, working to undercut the administration's own health experts in their role in developing a scheduling recommendation.

So there is a tension here that exists between the DEA and between our health officials in terms of the processes that we should be using. And I understand that part of the justification for a legislative solution is to create exemptions for veterinary medicine to avoid unnecessary interference in legitimate uses of xylazine. We can do that once we have a complete medical and scientific recommendation, and I look forward, obviously, to working with my great friend Senator Cortez Masto--she is, again, a great leader in this battle against the opioid epidemic--to identify the appropriate legislative solution once we have obtained that medical recommendation from the medical experts.

I also look forward to working with the Drug Enforcement Administration in making a serious effort to support Americans who are struggling with addiction, and that includes increasing access to medication treatment, including methadone, for opioid use disorder.

Senator Cortez Masto and I agree xylazine is dangerous. Our overdose epidemic is unacceptable, and we need solutions. I am honored to work with Senator Cortez Masto in this fight. We have solutions that we can pursue. We need to pass the Support Act Reauthorization. We need to give communities the tools to test and respond to substances coming into their communities. We need to train and support law enforcement and health providers responding to overdose after overdose. We need to break down old War on Drug structures that make it nearly impossible for Americans to get treatment they need without being criminalized, penalized, and stigmatized. But in pursuing these goals, we cannot provide solutions that offer the potential of undermining the process that has been in place to rely upon medical and scientific evaluation and then work in coordination with the Drug Enforcement Agency.

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