Statements on Introduced Bills and Joint Resolutions

Floor Speech

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Mr. PORTMAN. Mr. President, I rise to talk about an epidemic that is affecting my State of Ohio and every State represented in this Chamber. Senator Whitehouse just spoke. He worked with me over a period of about 3 years to put together legislation to address the heroin and prescription drug epidemic.

We had five conferences in Washington, DC, bringing in experts from around the country, including from my home State of Ohio. We looked at what is working and what is not working and came up with the best practices from around the country. That is what the legislation addresses. It is comprehensive. It deals with prevention and education. It deals with treatment. It deals with recovery. We learned longer term recovery was incredibly important to success.

It actually passed this body with a vote of 92 to 2. That never happens around here. It is because working together with both sides of the aisle we were able to look at a problem objectively, take the politics out of it, and figure out what would work to help turn the tide. It is something that is urgent. We have to address it.

I will tell you now nationally it appears overdose deaths from these opioids, heroin, prescription drugs, and now synthetic heroin is the No. 1 cause of accidental death, meaning it has surpassed car accidents. Sadly, it is getting worse, not better. So those changes this Congress voted on to modernize our Federal response to prescription drug and heroin addiction are incredibly important right now.

It was evidence-based. It was something where we again took best practices to make sure we were spending more money, but that money was going to places where it was proven to work. Now that CARA is law--the Comprehensive Addiction and Recovery Act, and it was signed into law by the President about 6 weeks ago--we are working with the administration to get it implemented as quickly as possible because there are a number of new programs, new funding sources.

It authorizes another $181 million per year on top of what is already being spent on this issue. Again, importantly, it authorizes new programs that we think will work better to reverse the tide, to get at the horrible epidemic that is growing in our States. We also need to work with the administration and with Congress to ensure that in the annual funding bills that are passed around here, we are fully funding this new effort.

At the year end, which is September 30, fiscal year end for the U.S. Government, there will be a funding mechanism. It is probably going to be what is called a continuing resolution, continuing funding from last year. That is good in one sense, because we did get more funding in this year's appropriations bill for this issue. We have about a 47- percent increase in funding for this year. So that would continue next year, but that is not enough.

Unfortunately, this crisis has taken hold in a way--it has gripped our country in a way that we need more. Just to be able to fully fund the CARA legislation, we need more. So we are calling on the administration to work with us to ensure that we can get more funding into whatever is going to be passed at the end of this month, likely again a continuing resolution, to provide adequate funding to ensure that at a minimum we are funding what is in the CARA legislation.

When there is a new appropriation for next year, which I assume will happen after the election, we also have hope because both the committee in the House and the committee in the Senate went through all their process, and they reported out of committee legislation that doubles the funding for opioids over a 2-year period. They included funding that is at $471 million, a 113-percent increase over the last 2 years. So we need to have a process to get this funding done. We hope the administration will work with us on that, even in this continuing resolution.

There is a group of 100 different organizations from around the country. It is a coalition that helped pass CARA that has recently sent a letter to the White House. It includes recovery advocacy groups, it includes prevention groups, and it includes law enforcement. This group of people who are on the frontlines, in the trenches all around the country, just sent a letter to the White House thanking the President for signing CARA into law but also expressing their support for fully funding it.

What they specifically asked for was that the White House include what is called an anomaly or an add-on to the continuing resolution for this purpose. I hope the White House is listening. I hope they do it. I want to add voice to this coalition, to say this is the right thing to do. I have also brought this up with our leadership in the Congress. There will be some add-ons or anomalies to any continuing resolution. There always are. We have to be sure it is transparent, that they make sense. This one makes sense. We should make it transparent but also make it high enough so it fully funds the CARA legislation, regardless of what happens with the appropriations bills going forward.

At the very least, let's close whatever gap there is between what is in the CR and what is needed to fully fund this legislation. Because I believe this is a crisis and an emergency, I actually would support emergency funding, going over and above what is in the CARA legislation. I think we should have a debate on that issue. We had one on the Senate floor. I voted for that. We were not able to get 60 votes for it, but I do think it is an issue that rises to that extraordinary level, like the Ebola issue, like the Zika virus, issues that are truly epidemics. This is.

Let me tell you why I call it an epidemic. We found out recently that drug overdose deaths in my home State of Ohio increased from about 2,500 deaths in 2014 to more than 3,000 in 2015, an increase of 20 percent in just 1 year.

Here is the sad news. This year, we are on track to exceed that percentage increase. In other words, we are on track this year to have better than a 20-percent increase in deaths from overdoses in Ohio. The Presiding Officer's State is probably experiencing the same thing. Nationwide, the number of heroin users tripled in just 7 years, and the number of drug overdoses every year tripled in just 4 years.

Since 2000, the number of annual opioid overdoses has quadrupled. So this problem is getting worse, not better. One reason these overdoses are increasing even faster than the number of new users is that the drugs on the street are getting stronger and stronger. So you are seeing not just more addiction, but you are seeing even higher levels of overdoses--more addictive, more dangerous, and more deadly.

Heroin is already deadly enough. It is extremely addictive, but it is now being laced with drugs like fentanyl, carfentanil, and U-4. You may have heard of this and wondered what it was. Well, it is a synthetic form of heroin. It is being made somewhere in a laboratory and being added often to heroin to poison the people we represent. It is that simple. Carfentanil, fentanyl, and U-4 are more dangerous.

In Ohio, fentanyl deaths increased nearly fivefold, from 80 in 2013 to about 500 in 2014--more than doubled to over 1,000 last year. Again, this year, we are on track to exceed that number significantly. Just 3 years ago, about 1 in 20 overdoses in Ohio were a result of fentanyl. Then it was one in five. Now it is more than one in three. You can see where this is going.

Prescription drugs are often the start of this. Four out of five heroin addicts in Ohio, they say, started with prescriptions drugs. This is an addiction that sometimes is inadvertent in the sense that someone might have a medical procedure and then be given these narcotic pain pills and develop this addiction, which is a physiological change in your brain. Addiction is a disease. It needs to be treated as such.

Increasingly now we are seeing these synthetic heroins come into our communities to the point that 1 in 3 overdoses now, instead of just 3 years ago 1 in 20--in Ohio--are due to these synthetic drugs. In my hometown of Cincinnati now, those fentanyl overdoses exceed the heroin overdoses. According to Dr. Lakshmi Sammarco, who is Hamilton County coroner in Southwest Ohio, drug overdose deaths in Hamilton County increased by 40 percent from just 2014 to 2015, while fentanyl overdose deaths increased 153 percent.

By the way, Dr. Sammarco and her medical team are doing an excellent job in very difficult circumstances. They are on top of this epidemic, but they need our help.

These synthetic drugs are incredibly powerful. Heroin is already extremely addictive, as I said, and typically much cheaper, stronger, and more widely available than these prescription painkillers we talked about. Fentanyl can be 50, sometimes even 100, times as powerful as heroin. Think about that. Carfentanil is sometimes 10,000 times as powerful as morphine.

So, as you can see, as these synthetic drugs are coming into our communities, they are more dangerous, they are stronger, they are more addictive. Carfentanil is so powerful, it is primarily used as a tranquilizer for large animals such as elephants. It is so powerful that in cases where the police who have responded to an overdose have overdosed from just breathing fentanyl in the air or getting it on their skin at the scene.

It is so powerful that sometimes multiple doses of Narcan are required to reverse an overdose. Narcan is this miracle drug that our first responders increasingly are carrying, and thank God it is there because it reverses the effects of the overdose, but Narcan is meant for a heroin overdose. Sometimes with these synthetic drugs like fentanyl and carfentanil and U-4, you need several doses of Narcan to reverse the overdose, and sometimes it does not work. I have heard cases where seven doses of Narcan were necessary to save someone's life. These synthetic drugs are taking a heavy toll on our country and my State of Ohio.

In particular, in my hometown in Ohio recently--Cincinnati, OH--in just one 6-day span in August it had 174 overdoses: 6 days, 174 overdoses in one city. That is less than 1 week in one city: 174. It is unprecedented, at least in our State. Dr. Sammarco has confirmed this sudden spike in overdoses is the result of heroin being laced with other drugs. At least in many of these cases it is carfentanil. So somebody is actually putting this large-animal tranquilizer into the heroin, mixing it, resulting in this huge spike in overdoses.

I was glad to be helpful in providing a sample of carfentanil for Coroner Sammarco, because she could not find it anywhere in the region easily. Once she found it, we were able to get the comparison of the sample to what had happened and be able to confirm that carfentanil was behind these huge increases in overdoses.

Our first responders deserve our praise because they were able to save the vast majority of these lives. So over 170 people overdosing, and yet, sadly, tragically, although there were four or five people who died, the rest of these people, over 170 people were saved. That is amazing. It is because they responded quickly. They responded professionally.

Last Wednesday I went to Fire Station 24 in Cincinnati, OH, which handled the largest number of these overdoses--1 fire station, 34 overdoses in 6 days. They talked to me about how they saved lives. I thanked them, of course, for what they are doing every day. One thing they said to me was: Senator, this is not the answer. Saving people by using Narcan is necessary, it is absolutely necessary, but they said it is not the answer.

I agree with them. The answer is getting people into treatment, getting them back on track, getting them into longer term recovery rather than applying Narcan again and again, as they tell me, sometimes to the same person. By the way, this epidemic is taking a toll on our firefighters and other first responders--police officers also. As we said, it has made their jobs more dangerous. It is also taking more of their time and resources.

Last year the number we have is that firefighters and other first responders applied Narcan 16,000 times in one State. This year it will be far higher than that. By the way, this is why CARA provides training for Narcan, the legislation we talked about earlier, the Comprehensive Addiction and Recovery Act. It also provides more resources to our first responders to purchase Narcan. Narcan is getting more expensive, in part, because there is an increased demand. We have to be sure there are not any other reasons that those expenses are going up, and we have to be sure to provide the resources to our first responders so they can have these lifesaving drugs on hand.

By the way, firefighters all over Ohio tell me the same thing, and I have talked to a number of them. I have gone to other firehouses, and I ask the same question everywhere I go: Are you going on more fire runs or more overdose runs? The answer now--consistently, everywhere I go-- is overdoses. There are more overdoses than fire runs in every firehouse I have been to in Ohio.

The scenes they encounter when they go on these runs are truly heartbreaking. They see families torn apart. During that unprecedented 6-day period in Cincinnati, they saved the lives of two parents who had overdosed in front of their two teenage sons.

Last week in West Chester Township, OH, outside of Cincinnati, police saved the lives of a father and son who together overdosed on heroin while the father was driving on Interstate I-75. Thank God no one else was injured or killed.

A few days later, in Forest Park, OH, outside of Cincinnati, a 3- year-old girl found her grandmother, who was babysitting her, unconscious from an overdose. When police arrived with Narcan to save her grandmother's life, the story from the police officer was the little girl asked one of the police officers to please hold her while her grandmother was unconscious on the floor. It is heartbreaking.

Forest Park police responded to five other overdoses that same day, including another overdose in the same apartment complex. This is a small town with a population of about 19,000 people.

Two weeks ago, the Akron Beacon Journal published a letter from a high school girl from Akron to her dad, who was addicted to heroin. She writes to her dad, in part:

When I found out you got arrested, I was happy. . . . I was going to finally be able to sleep at night without having to worry about whether I was going to get a call the next day telling me that [heroin] had finally taken you away. I know that being in prison isn't the best life, but at least you are alive. . . . This is what heroin does: it possesses its victim and does not let go until he is dead.

To that high school girl, what we hope is that her father goes through a drug court, can get into treatment, can get into longer term recovery, reunite with his family, and get back to his life.

We know that many of the drugs that are causing so many of these overdoses in Ohio--the fentanyl, the Carfentanil, the U-4--don't come from Ohio. In fact, they don't come from any State in this body; they come from other countries. Incidentally, it doesn't mean that someday they couldn't come from this country, but right now they are coming from other countries. From all the information we have from law enforcement, we believe the vast majority of these synthetic drugs are being made in laboratories in China and in India and then shipped through the mail to our communities to meet this growing demand for drugs. The traffickers actually get this poison, this synthetic drug, through the U.S. mail system. Right now, it is difficult to detect these packages coming from overseas before it is way too late. Unlike private carriers such as UPS, FedEx, or others, the Postal Service does not require electronic Customs data for packages coming into the country, so we don't know what is coming in. This makes dangerous packages containing drugs such as fentanyl or Carfentanil or U-4 that much harder to stop.

We have had hearings on this issue in the Senate. In June, the Judiciary Committee held a hearing on synthetic drugs. A witness testified that because of this loophole of the Postal Service not requiring the information but the private carriers requiring it, getting these drugs into our communities was easier and that the drug traffickers used the mail system. To me, it is a loophole.

The Homeland Security Committee on which I sit has also held hearings and a roundtable discussion on the flow of fentanyl and other synthetic forms of heroin into this country. We learned the same thing--that there is this discrepancy between how the mail system handles it and how private carriers handle it.

Today I have introduced legislation to address the threat of synthetic drugs by simply closing that loophole, simply saying that with regard to packages coming from overseas, the Postal Service should require advanced electronic data so we know what is in these packages. This would include information such as who and where it is coming from, where it is going, and what is in it.

As Customs and Border Patrol--the border protection people--has told us, this information will provide a much better tool to law enforcement to help them ensure that these dangerous drugs won't end up in the hands of drug traffickers who then sell these dangerous drugs in our communities. It will make our streets safer and save lives by helping to prevent overdoses. I think it is a commonsense idea that builds on CARA, the Comprehensive Addiction and Recovery Act, because while CARA addresses the demand for drugs through prevention, education, treatment, and recovery, this legislation will help to cut the supply of drugs, help to cut off the flow of this poison into our communities. I think these two ideas go hand in hand. If you are one of the 92 Senators in this body, out of 100, who voted for CARA, I hope you will support this legislation too.

Our law enforcement and first responders are doing an amazing job. They are saving lives every single day, and they are to be commended, but they need some help. They deserve our best efforts to stop these dangerous drugs from entering into the country in the first place, and so do the hundreds of thousands of families in Ohio and around the country who have been affected by this epidemic of addiction. They deserve our help as well. They deserve a safer community. They deserve peace of mind. They deserve to know that we are doing all we can to try to keep these dangerous synthetic drugs out of our communities.

Just as I did with the CARA legislation, I urge my colleagues on both sides of the aisle to support this additional legislation. Frankly, 3\1/2\ years ago when we started putting together the CARA legislation, if this synthetic drug issue had been at the level it is today, I believe it would have been included in the CARA legislation. But we are now seeing this epidemic growing--heroin and prescription drugs, yes, but increasingly synthetic drugs, as we talked about this evening. It is time for us to be sure we are doing all we can to keep this poison out of our communities. ______

By Mr. REID:

S. 3293. A bill to require the Secretary of the Interior to transfer to the Shoshone-Paiute Tribes of the Duck Valley Reservation investment income held in certain funds; to the Committee on Indian Affairs.

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