Blog: This afternoon, the House voted on H.R. 5046, the Comprehensive Opioid Abuse Reduction Act of 2016.

Statement

This afternoon, the House voted on H.R. 5046, the Comprehensive Opioid Abuse Reduction Act of 2016. This bill would authorize the appropriation of $103 million a year for five years to provide grants to combat drug addiction at the state and local level. While the bill passed 413 to 5, I was one of five to vote against it, and I would offer a few thoughts on that front.

Addiction to prescription painkillers, heroin, and other forms of opioids has increased at an alarming rate in recent years. The number of Americans addicted to heroin is nearly three times higher than just ten years ago. In 2013, over 40,000 Americans died from a drug overdose, nearly 2 million Americans were addicted to opioid-based prescription painkillers, and over 500,000 were addicted to heroin. The Lowcountry isn't immune from this problem, as Charleston, Berkeley, and Dorchester Counties lost a total of 64 people to opioid-related deaths in 2014.

The growing number of people who are addicted to these types of drugs and the rising number of overdose deaths deserves attention and response, but simply throwing money at a problem doesn't always offer the best solution. The grants created by this bill will be funded by cutting existing programs offered by the Department of Justice, which are funded every year through appropriations. While the $103 million for this year is paid for with old spending, the same is not true for the other four years of the bill, and Congress would have to make up the difference in a later bill.

Another element of federal grants that often puts states in a tough spot is the fact that the matching formula, or percentage the federal government pays vs the state costs, is often subject to change. I experienced this firsthand when I wore a different hat as governor. In many cases what would happen is you'd start a program and in the first year the federal government would pay, for example, 80 cents on the dollar in costs while the state would pick up the rest. Next year, there'd be some horse trading in Washington, and the grant would get put on the chopping block, and all of a sudden the state has to come up with 50 cents on the dollar instead of 20.

For instance in 2013, the federal government cut grants to Indiana by nearly half a trillion dollars--amounting to 4.3 percent of the size of the entire state's economy! The state faced a choice of massive budget cuts or major tax increases in the space of a single year. To get more specific, the Economic Development Administration in Indiana lost 36 percent of its federal funds that year. Rightly or wrongly, businesses were relying on that money for their expansion plans, and suddenly their plans were no longer economically viable. I'd offer that kind of scenario serves neither the federal taxpayer nor the grant recipient.

While taking up a bill at the federal level to reduce addiction draws attention to the issue, state governments have been working on solutions long before this particular bill was introduced. In December 2014, Governor Haley introduced a plan for the state of South Carolina to prevent and treat prescription drug abuse and included recommendations that better coordinates the role doctors, mental health counselors, educators, first responders, and law enforcement officers play in curbing this problem. Many of programs recommended by the state plan are already funded through federal grants. In 2016 alone, South Carolina was awarded $1.1 million from the Health Resources & Services Administration, $451,500 from the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration, and $1.3 million from the Centers for Disease Control -- a total of nearly $3 million - to implement programs designed to stop prescription drug abuse.

Addressing the ongoing issue of prescription drug and heroin abuse, addiction, and death is of great importance, but once again the federal government shouldn't be in the business of borrowing from the next generation to accomplish these goals. A service performed today should be paid for today, and since the funding authorized by this bill was not offset for the entire five year span of the bill, I voted no.

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