National Sea Grant College Program Amendments Act of 2015
Floor Speech
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Mr. MURPHY. Mr. President, I am not supportive of the bill we will be voting on shortly relative to the labeling of GMOs, but I do admit the Senator is right in that this was an example of a group of Democrats and Republicans working on a solution that may end up getting the support of a supermajority of this body. That is the difference between what happened on the process of developing a GMO bill and the process of developing our response to the Zika epidemic.
Everybody knows what happened here. We had a bipartisan compromise that passed the Senate. It went to a conference committee. Democrats were shut out of the conference committee. I am a member of that conference committee. There was no negotiation between Republicans and Democrats. Republicans on the conference committee threw out the bipartisan compromise that was negotiated here in the Senate in order to address the concerns of very conservative Members of the House Republican caucus, and the bill got loaded up with all of the things that Senator Durbin mentioned. At the top of the list was a ban on funding for Planned Parenthood, which Republicans on the conference committee knew would poison the well. They knew that by putting in a ban on funding for Planned Parenthood, they would make it impossible to pass the Zika supplemental request.
We don't need to engage in hyperbole or histrionics. That is what happened. What happened is the Republicans decided to put a bill on the floor of the Senate that couldn't pass, knowing exactly what could pass because weeks earlier we had formed a compromise that was thrown out the window. It is a little unpleasant to be lectured to about why Democrats are unwilling to support the Zika bill that is in front of us because Republicans know exactly why we can't support it. It is because the compromise that we all worked on got thrown out and all sorts of political poison pills got added to it that everyone in the conference knew would mean it wouldn't pass the Senate. Opioid Epidemic
Mr. President, I want to talk about another public health crisis that is confronting this country, and that is the overdose crisis that is plaguing every single State that we hail from. Here is the picture of overdoses in my State over the course of the last 4 years. It is a harrowing chart in that, if you go back to 2012, we had just under 400 drug overdose deaths that year. We are on pace in 2016 to more than double that number. Our projected number of overdose deaths is 832.
If you look deeper into this chart, it is fentanyl and heroin that are driving these numbers. In fact, our cocaine overdoses have remained relatively stable. It is fentanyl and heroin that are skyrocketing. You can put this chart up for almost every other State in the country and see the same phenomenon. Here it is broken down by town. There is almost no town in Connecticut that hasn't been visited by this epidemic. This small town here is one that you probably know. That is New Haven, CT. On June 23, a few weeks ago, city officials in New Haven declared a public health emergency after 17 individuals overdosed and 3 people died from fentanyl in less than 24 hours. Some of the patients needed as many as five doses of Narcan to revive them. The public health authorities and law enforcement in the city effectively ran out of Narcan overnight because of this batch of straight, pure fentanyl that killed 3 people and sent 17 others to the hospital. That is just one night in one town.
Two years ago, the United States Congress authorized $4 billion in emergency funding to combat the Ebola virus--$4 billion for a virus that had less than 10 confirmed cases in the United States. In Connecticut, we are going to have 830 people die from opioid overdose this year. We are a small State. We represent 1 percent of the Nation's population. We are going to have 830 people die from overdoses this year, and this Congress hasn't appropriated one dime of emergency funding.
You can't help but think there is a double standard here--that perhaps the reason we are not allocating emergency funding for this epidemic, which is killing dozens of people every week in my State, is because of the nature of the epidemic. It is rooted in addiction, and we still have a stigma about addiction in which we blame the addict.
Marvin and Laura Beninson came into my office, and they told me the story of their beautiful, bright young daughter Victoria, who began slurring her words at Easter dinner. Victoria was a wonderful young woman. They knew something was wrong that Easter. When she left the house, they went into her room, and they found needles and little packets of a substance, and they said: Thus began our battle with heroin addiction.
This is the father talking now. He said:
My daughter has been through detox and six treatment centers. She has stolen and hocked all of my wife's jewelry while we were on vacation, stolen $3,000 to 4,000 from my oldest daughter's bank account while she was in the Army, written thousands of dollars of bad checks from her friend's check book and been arrested for shop lifting.
The truth is that addiction is a disease just like cancer and there is no choice once you have it. It certainly was our daughter's choice to take heroin but it wasn't her choice to become addicted.
Addiction is a disease, and it can be treated medically, just like every other disease. There may be an element of choice in taking that first dose, but after that there is a medical solution. Yet, for some reason, we allocate $4 billion to combat Ebola and not a dime to combat the epidemic of opioid abuse.
The funding that we are asking for--and my colleague Senator Shaheen put a vote before this body to appropriate $600 million in emergency funding--would go to SAMHSA for treatment. It would go to education programs, to prescription drug monitoring programs, and $230 million of it would go to justice assistance grants to make sure we are catching the bad guys who are selling this kind of Fentanyl that is killing people in New Haven.
Every day that we wait, this epidemic becomes worse and more people perish. We need to come together and appropriate emergency funding to take on this epidemic. We need to do it soon, but we need to do other things as well. Deeply buried into our Medicaid reimbursement laws is a discriminatory prohibition on Medicaid funding being used for long-term substance abuse and mental health treatment beds. The Presiding Officer and I are trying to repeal this provision as it relates to the treatment of people with mental illness, but it also relates to people who are struggling with substance abuse.
Medicaid dollars cannot be used for long-term treatment beds for individuals with substance abuse and mental illness. It is one of the few instances in our reimbursement policy at the Federal level in which we specifically prohibit reimbursement for a treatment that has been prescribed by a medical professional. Again, this seems rooted in this decades-old stigma about people with mental illness and substance abuse--that they should just get over it, they should just cure themselves, and they should make a different choice. So there is not a need for these long-term beds.
The second thing we need to do, in addition to appropriating emergency funding to take care of this immediate crisis, is to repeal the prohibition on Medicaid dollars going to long-term treatment beds. Not everybody needs long-term treatment but many do. Many are comorbid with a substance abuse disorder and a mental illness. Yet you get kicked out of many treatment centers within a handful of days. This is a discriminatory provision in our law, and it is leading in parts of this epidemic because once they show up in the emergency room, there is no place to put them.
Third, we need to build on what the administration announced recently and pass the TREAT Act. The TREAT Act would allow for more patients to get prescription naloxone--buprenorphine--for treatment of their addiction. It is an effective drug, but as of now doctors can only see a relative handful of patients before they hit a statutory cap. We have examples in Connecticut of individuals traveling on 12 buses for 12 hours to find a prescriber who still had room under the cap in order to prescribe buprenorphine.
The lengths you have to go to get medical treatment for addiction are more evidence of this discriminatory treatment and this stigma that remains in the law. There is no cap when it comes to the number of patients a cancer doctor or an orthopedic surgeon can have, but there is a cap on the number of patients addiction doctors can have.
We have to pass the TREAT Act as well. These addictions can be treated.
I sat down with a group of former heroin users, individuals in recovery, in Bristol, CT, back in March. I spent an entire day in March living the life of the epidemic. I visited emergency rooms, first responders, and people in recovery.
Greg told me his story. He injured his back in his line of work as an arborist. He works with trees, and he injured his back. He was prescribed prescription painkillers for his herniated disk. You have heard this story before. He got hooked on the prescription painkillers and continued to see doctors so he could get as many prescriptions as possible--until he ran out. When he couldn't get any more prescription drugs, he turned to heroin and became an addict. He looked and looked and looked for treatment but couldn't find it. Finally, he ran into Courtney Labonte, who runs a Web site called ctsuboxone.com. She found a treatment provider who could get him on medication therapy. Today he is in recovery and doing better. He has made the decision to change his life, and he has the resources to do it. There are millions of people who can tell that story as well, but not enough.
Without this funding and the repeal of the discriminatory Medicaid rule and without passage of the TREAT Act, we are denying medical treatment to the thousands of people in my State--including the 800 people who will die this year from overdosing--who are grappling with addiction. I hope that before we break, we will find the courage and common sense to pass these measures and at least get some emergency funding appropriated.
I thank the body for its time.
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