releases: https://www.portman.senate.gov/public/index.cfm/press-releases?ID=68C432D6-83E5-4CCF-9EED-E32A02D86AFA
Data license: MIT · Data source: dwillis/congress-press
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| https://www.portman.senate.gov/public/index.cfm/press-releases?ID=68C432D6-83E5-4CCF-9EED-E32A02D86AFA | On Senate Floor, Portman Raises Awareness of Heroin Epidemic for 29th Time This Year | 2016-12-09 | 2016 | 2016-12 | Republican | House | OH | Rob Portman | P000449 | www.portman.senate.gov | legacy | WASHINGTON, D.C. – This afternoon, U.S. Senator Rob Portman (R-OH) delivered remarks on the Senate floor to raise awareness about the epidemic of heroin and prescription drug addiction, and to urge his colleagues to adequately fund efforts to fight it – his 29th floor speech on the issue this year. Transcript from his remarks can be found below and a video can be found here. “Mr. President, I rise today to talk about the heroin and prescription drug epidemic that’s gripped our country and my state of Ohio, but first let me just say a word about John Glenn. I spoke on the floor yesterday about his passing. We lost him yesterday afternoon at age 95, a true icon, and his life was really the life of our country over the time period from when he joined his fellow Mercury astronauts and was the first American to orbit the Earth to the time that he served here in the Senate and went on to found the Glenn College at The Ohio State University. An amazing life. Later today we’re going to ask the full Senate to vote on a resolution that Senator Sherrod Brown, my colleague from Ohio, and I are working on. And we hope to have that resolution voted on successfully and allow the entire Senate to pay tribute to a remarkable American life, a former colleague of ours, and one whose seat I am very humbled and honored to hold today, and that is John Glenn. So we will be bringing that up later during the day. “But again today, I’d like it talk a little about an issue that is one that this Congress has focused on more in the last few months and to commend the Congress for that, but also to continue to raise awareness of it and to allow all of us the opportunity to figure out how we can do more in our own way, in our own communities, in our own homes to be able to address it, and this is this heroin and prescription drug epidemic. It is now to the point where we have somebody in our great country who is dying of an overdose every 12 minutes. One American is losing his or her life every 12 minutes. In my own state of Ohio, we’ve been particularly hard-hit by this. We lose one Ohioan every few hours. “The statistics are overwhelming. It is now the number-one cause of accidental death in our country. It has been the case in Ohio since 2007, but behind those statistics, of course, are faces and families and communities. A four-year-old boy was recently coming into his bedroom in Cleveland, Ohio, in the old Brooklyn neighborhood, he found his dad dead of an overdose, 30 years old. That was just in the news this week. Recently there were two men in Sandusky, Ohio, found unconscious in a parking lot. Someone was there and recorded both their overdose and then the first responders coming. The Sandusky first responders found them barely breathing and brought them back to life with this miracle drug called Narcan or naloxone. “These first responders saved this life, as they have saved 16,000 lives last year in Ohio. This year it will be an even larger number, after we find out after the year closes. But it is not for the faint of heart, this video. It’s out on the internet; some of you have probably seen it. It’s gone viral. But it shows what these first responders and what our communities are dealing with every single day. By the way, I’ve talked to firefighters around the state and the Sandusky firefighters are no exception. They tell me they have responded to more overdoses than they have fires over the past year. More overdoses than they have fires. These are our firefighters who are again saving lives every day. “When I was in Canton, Ohio, last week, I was told that there had been twice as many overdose deaths this year already as last year, and again the firefighters there and other first responders tell me it’s their number-one focus and concern. When I talk to county prosecutors and sheriffs around Ohio, they also tell me it is the number-one cause of crime in each of their counties in Ohio, whether it’s an urban county or a rural county or a suburban county. It is everywhere. It knows no zip code. So this problem is one that, unfortunately, has gripped our country like no other. I started off work on this issue over 20 years ago when cocaine and marijuana and, later, methamphetamines were an issue and certainly all those drugs are horrible and our prevention efforts led to what was called the Drug-Free Communities Act, which was passed to be able to help address this. “More than 2,000 community coalitions have been formed to help with that. But this new wave of addiction in my view is worse. It’s worse in terms of the number of overdoses and deaths. It is worse in terms of the impact on families, tearing them apart. It is worse in terms of the crime it creates, mostly with people creating more and more crime to be able to feed their habit. It’s worse in terms of the ability to get people back on track to help them with recovery. It is a very difficult addiction. “The United States Congress, including this body, have taken action, as I said, and I appreciate that. Let me tell you why we need to take take action. I talked about these two men in Sandusky, Ohio, found unconscious; had overdosed. Again this is something that someone had videotaped—the first responders coming and saving their lives. When one of these men was revived—his name is Michael Williams—this is what he said: ‘I have a problem. If I could get help, I would. I need it. And I want it.’ Mr. President, I believe that if someone needs treatment for addiction and they’re willing to get it, then we ought to be able to provide it. “That’s why it’s important that Congress be involved, that state legislatures be involved, that we be involved in our communities, to ensure that when someone is ready to get that treatment, that it’s accessible. I have a met with addicts and their families all over our state, probably met with several hundred addicts or recovering addicts in the last couple years alone as we’ve put together this legislation and tried to work on something that is actually evidence-based and will help, and so many of them tell me they’re ready. One grieving father told me that his daughter had been in and out of treatment centers and finally after several years of trying to deal with her addiction, she acknowledged that she was ready. And he personally took her to a treatment center in Ohio. “They told him and told her that they would love to help, but they were fully booked. They didn’t have a bed available. They would have to have one in a couple of weeks. During those 14 days, he found his daughter in her bedroom having overdosed and died. Those stories are heart-wrenching, aren’t they? And yet they’re stories from every one of our states. So access to treatment is important. Access to longer-term recovery is important, so people can get back on track to lead healthy, productive lives once again. It’s also really important that we do a better job on prevention and education. Ultimately to keep people out of the funnel of addiction is the most effective way to deal with this issue and we need to redouble our efforts there to raise awareness of the connection between prescription drugs and heroin and these other sympathetic heroins, these opioids, because four out of five heroin addicts in your state, probably started with prescription drugs and then shifted over to heroin. There is an opportunity for us to do more about that by raising that awareness because when people learn more about that connection, then they’re smarter about the danger that is inherent in taking these often narcotic painkillers that are sometimes overprescribed. “To raise awareness about this issue, I have come to the floor every week we have been in session since February. This is now our 29th speech about this issue, the opportunity to talk about it, raise awareness about it. And I will say again over the course of those 29 weeks, a lot of things have happened here by raising awareness. One is this body passed legislation called the Comprehensive Addiction and Recovery Act, otherwise known as CARA. We passed it here in this chamber after taking it through committee after three years of work, conferences, bringing people in from around the country, experts. “The legislation focuses on how to actually come up with a better way to do prevention, education, treatment, recovery and to help our first responders with naloxone, this Narcan miracle drug, provide training, help get prescription drugs off the shelves, help with drug takeback programs. All of this resulted in CARA passing this body by a vote of 92 to 2. That never happens around here. So it was an overwhelming bipartisan support for what is needed. This past summer, late this summer, President Obama signed that legislation into law, and it’s now being implemented, and I commend the administration for moving as quickly as possible on this. “There are a couple of programs that are already up and running. We’ve now provided, for instance, for nurse practitioners and physician assistants to be able to help with regard to medication-assisted treatment. That’s something that was urgent in my home state of Ohio and other places, just the need to have more people to be able to help recovering addicts get back on track. That’s happening right now. That’s already being implemented. Other aspects of the legislation including some of the prevention programs and the national awareness campaign on connecting prescription drugs to heroin is still being put into effect. I again today urge the administration to move as quickly as possible. And for the administration-elect, the new administration to be prepared to step in to ensure that this legislation moves quickly. “I think that CARA is probably the most important anti-drug legislation we have passed in this body in at least two decades. It’s evidence-based, it’s comprehensive. It will improve prevention, treatment. The first time ever we’ve put long-term recovery into any legislation, which is incredibly important for success. We talked earlier about the difficulty of getting people out of the grip of addiction, having that longer term recovery aspect. Think of recovery housing and being supported by a supportive group rather than going back to the old neighborhood or going back to a family that is suffering from this issue, that longer-term recovery really helped to improve the rates of success. That’s in our legislation. It also begins to remove the stigma of addiction. I think that in some respects may be the most important part of the legislation. It acknowledges that addiction is a disease. And as a disease, it needs to be treated as such. When people come forward to be able to get treatment and probably eight out of 10 heroin addicts are not, you obviously see much better results for the person, for the family, for the community. “For example, think about Ashley from Dayton, Ohio. At just age 32 years-old, she died of a heroin overdose recently, leaving her three small children without a mom. After Ashley died, her mom went back and looked at her diary to see what she had said during her last several weeks. She found it; she read it, and what she wrote in her diary will break your heart. It details her daily struggle with addiction. It talks about the pain and the suffering. Here’s one passage.’ I am so ashamed. I am an addict. I am always be an addict. I know I need help. But, she wrote, ‘I’m afraid to get it because I know I’ll need to go away for it. I will be away from my kids.’ “CARA actually, this legislation I talked about, was designed to help women like Ashley. It not only helps erase the stigma of addiction to help get women like her to come forward, acknowledge their illness, and get the help they need, but it allows women in recovery to bring their kids with them. So you have family treatment centers and funding available for those kinds of treatment centers and for longer-term recovery so we can keep families together. “It authorizes $181 million in investments and opioid programs every year going forward, and again it ensures that taxpayer dollars are spent more wisely and effectively by channeling them to programs that have been tested—that we know based on evidence actually work. I will say even with these new policies in place under CARA, we’re going to have to fight every year for the funding as part of the appropriations process, and we’re doing that today. In the most recent continuing resolution which funds government until tonight, we were able to get $37 million in short-term funding to be sure CARA was fully funded during that four-month period of time. Soon we will be voting on the next four months or so of a continuing resolution, and once again we have fought the good fight on both sides of the aisle. We have asked the Appropriations Committee to include the funding for CARA. We have been successful in doing that. There is full funding in the continuing resolution that will be voted on here shortly that provides for the implementation of this legislation. That’s really important, because if that funding had not been provided even for the short term, it would have been difficult to get these programs up and going, again on prevention and treatment and recovery and helping the first responders with regard to Narcan training and supply. So that’s important. If we fully fund it and we support getting more people into treatment, we will save lives. There’s no question about it. If we fully fund the prevention, we will save lives. “In addition to that funding, under the 21st Century Cures Act, which was just passed by the House and Senate over the past few days, there is additional funding that’s immediate funding that goes to the states. It allows the states to use their own programs that they have through block grants to be able to help address this crisis that we face. I strongly support that. I think this epidemic is such that we need to do both, have the longer term evidence-based programs in place year after year for the future, but also immediately give our states an infusion of funds to be able to help with their existing programs. “I believe that this legislation is critical in my home state of Ohio and I know how it is going to be used. It will be used well. Our Department of Mental Health and Addictive Services needs it. That legislation was an authorization in the 21st Century Cures Act. It was two years of funding, $500 million next year, and $500 million the next year to fund efforts to deal with this crisis immediately. That funding has now shifted also into the continuing resolution, so for this year, we now have under this appropriations bill we’re about to vote on that additional funding of $500 million. So we had to do the authorization and then the appropriation, and that’s part of the C.R. So that’s something people should think about as they look at this continuing resolution. We know that this funding will help because we know prevention keeps people out of this funnel of addiction—the most effective way—and the treatment can work. I’ve met so many people across Ohio who have taken advantage of treatment, of a supportive environment that comes with recovery programs and have been successful, so many stories of hope. “One is the story of Rachel Motil from Columbus, Ohio. As a teenager, Rachel abused alcohol, she then turned to pills, and then once the pills were too expensive—as we said, all too common— she switched to heroin. She stole from her family, even selling her mother’s arthritis medication. She stole jewelry from her boyfriend’s parents. She wrote herself checks from her mom’s checkbook. For those who are watching, listening, who have members of their family who are suffering from this illness, you know what I’m talking about. She received help finally. Her help came from Netcare Crisis Services initially, detoxing and getting into treatment and then Maryhaven treatment center. “I visited Maryhaven in October. I had the chance to meet with some of the recovering addicts who were there, talked with them about what they had been through. Rachel is an example of a success story. She is now two years sober and studying finance at Columbus State Community College. She is a success. If we fully fund CARA and if we get this legislation in place with regard to these CURES appropriations, we will see more success stories like that. We will save lives across our country. “For all those who are suffering from the disease of addiction like Ashley from Dayton I talked about or Michael from Sandusky we talked about or Rachel from Northland, let’s do the right thing. Let’s fight for them. Let’s implement CARA quickly. Let’s build on this common-sense law. Let’s support additional funding now so we can help as many Americans as possible. By doing so, Mr. President, I believe we can begin to turn the tide on this addiction, and not only save lives but help so many of our constituents lead more productive and full lives. I yield back my time.” ### | 1 | 2026-03-30T12:14:52Z | 2026-03-30T12:14:52Z |