Comprehensive Addiction and Recovery Act of 2015--Motion to Proceed--
Floor Speech
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Ms. KLOBUCHAR. Mr. President, I come to the floor to speak in favor of the Comprehensive Addiction and Recovery Act. Senator Whitehouse and I have been working on this together for years, along with Senator Portman and Senator Ayotte, so this bill has been bipartisan from the beginning. I thank my colleagues, and I also thank Senator Grassley and Senator Leahy for their leadership in bringing this to the floor and all members of our committee, including the Presiding Officer, who have contributed to this bill.
Our Nation is facing a serious problem with drug addiction, and I am glad to join my colleagues today to talk about how we can tackle this problem and work toward a solution by passing this bipartisan bill. Just last week I was out in Montevideo, MN, and we gathered together some people from the town. It is a town of a couple thousand people. Our goal was to just talk about this problem. I was shocked that early in the morning on a Saturday we had 50 people there. We had every doctor in the town there, to my knowledge. We had the sheriff there, the police chief there.
At one point a regular citizen who was there, who had suffered from some diseases and had been in the hospital, actually emptied out her purse and tons of medications and opioids came rolling out onto the table that she hadn't used. It was an image I will not forget and an image I bring to the Senate floor to remind us there are too many of these drugs out in our communities.
I heard stories of young children who had dealers--people who were trying to get the opioids--actually saying to them: Hey, I will give you a beer if you will go to your parents' medical cabinets and look for these drugs, and they would write them down for them. The kids would then go, get the drugs, and bring them back.
There was a story of one doctor who was treating someone, thought he was pretty normal. He had back pain, and the doctor had given him some painkillers for years. Then, all of a sudden, one day the Secret Service shows up because this man had actually made a threat on the life of the President. He had an entire nightlife that was different than his day life, and it was completely dictated by the fact he was addicted to prescription drugs.
Four out of five heroin users get their start these days from prescription drugs. I don't think anyone would have ever imagined that. When I was growing up, when we saw heroin addicts on the corner or when I was a prosecutor for years, we never had those kinds of statistics. People got hooked on heroin because they got hooked on heroin. They started with heroin and they, sadly, would end with heroin. In this case, we have 80 percent of people becoming addicted because they have a surgery because they have back pain. They then get too much of the drug or no one figures out that getting hooked on the drug is worse than the pain they had in the first place, and they get hooked on the drug.
We also have stories of overdoses of people who are not even taking the drugs for periods of time. So we have a crisis in this country, and when I met with those people in Montevideo, it hit home to me that it can happen at any time.
We didn't pick this town because they were having a big crisis or because they had a number of deaths. We just happened to be in that area of the State and decided we wanted to focus on the issue.
Before I was elected to the Senate, I spent 8 years serving as chief prosecutor in Hennepin County, which includes Minneapolis. Drug cases made up about one-third of our caseload, which meant we handled everything from trafficking and selling to production and manufacturing. From this position, I had an opportunity to see firsthand the devastating impact of drug addiction.
Mr. President, I see my colleague from Indiana has arrived. I am managing the bill for this hour, and if he wants to speak, I can go back and finish my remarks later. I will just finish up while he is getting back to his desk.
I was talking about my time as county attorney. Many of those people who were affected by addiction that we saw were hooked on opioids, including both heroin and we saw the start of this prescription painkiller epidemic.
We would be sadly mistaken if we think drug abuse only happens in our cities or the metropolitan areas of our States. As I saw this weekend-- when I met with some of our people--Beltrami County, MN, received three emergency calls for heroin overdoses in 1 day. One of those individuals passed away. So this is happening every day.
Mr. President, I am going to turn it over now to Senator Coats of Indiana.
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Ms. KLOBUCHAR. Madam President, I come to the floor today to speak in favor of our bill, the Comprehensive Addiction and Recovery Act. I thank Senator Whitehouse, Senator Portman, and the Presiding Officer for their leadership. We have worked together on a bipartisanship basis on this bill from the beginning. Our Nation, as we know, is facing a serious problem with drug addiction, and I am glad to join my colleagues to talk about how we can handle this problem and how we can do something about it.
Earlier in my speech today I referred to a group that I met with in Montevideo, MN, with only a few days' notice. All the doctors in the town showed up. The sheriff, the police chief, and regular constituents poured a bunch of medications on the table to show how much we are seeing in terms of overprescription and how this can so easily get in the wrong hands or turn people into addicts.
I came to this issue first as a prosecutor. I spent 8 years serving as the chief prosecutor in Hennepin County, which includes Minneapolis. Drug cases made up about one-third of our caseload, which meant we handled everything from trafficking and selling to production and manufacturing. From this position, I had an opportunity to see firsthand the devastating impacts of drug addiction. Many of those affected were hooked on opiates, including both heroin and prescription pain medication. But even when I left that office in 1998, I didn't see anything near what we are seeing today. We were starting to see the beginnings of the addiction on prescription drugs, but nothing like we are seeing today. In fact, four out of five heroin users are getting their start by misusing prescription drugs.
We would be sadly mistaken if we thought this was only an urban problem. We know it is a huge problem in our rural areas. In Beltrami County, MN, just this past weekend there were three emergency calls for overdoses. One of those people passed away. That is a rural county in our State on one weekend.
Many of those who have been affected by this epidemic are young people. Over just 6 months in 2013, three people died of opiate overdoses and another three were hospitalized for overdosing on heroin in one 7,000-person town in Minnesota. These statistics and stories are troubling, and they show why we must focus on both treatment and prevention.
Minnesota is home to Hazelden Betty Ford Addiction Treatment Center. We are proud of the work and the leadership our State shows when it comes to treatment--one of the reasons I got involved in this issue. Hazelden Betty Ford has had impressive success with its comprehensive opiate response program. Their program offers the best of both worlds: lifesaving medicine to help treat the medical causes of addiction, as well as counseling to help people get on the right path.
However, too many people have been unable to get the treatment they need. Almost 10 percent of Americans are estimated to need treatment for issues related to drug and alcohol, but only about 1 percent receives treatment at a specialty facility. That is why my colleagues and I have come together to introduce this bill.
Our bill covers strategies for prevention, evidence-based programs such as strengthening prescription drug monitoring programs--something I worked on with the Presiding Officer. These types of programs help States track data on controlled substances like opioids so that when they are dispensed, they can be a strong, effective tool in making sure that they are used for the right reasons.
This last week I was near the South Dakota border. There were doctors who knew patients were also going into South Dakota to get prescriptions. It was very difficult for them to trace what was going on--which pharmacy they would go to in rural areas. They could drive an hour and go to a different pharmacy, drive another hour and go to a different pharmacy--maybe see a different doctor in South Dakota and maybe check into an emergency room somewhere else. That is going on today in our country.
Another important provision in our bill will help make drugs less accessible by providing consumers with safe and responsible ways to dispose of unused prescription drugs. According to the DEA, more than 2,700 tons of expired, unwanted prescription medications have been collected through these programs since the drug take-back law that we passed in 2010 was put into place. That is a bill I worked on with Senator Cornyn, who is also on the Judiciary Committee with me. It is called the Secure and Responsible Drug Disposal Act. It took a long time for the DEA to get their act together to get the rules up. The rules came up, and guess what. Literally, a few months later, Walgreens has now said they will offer kiosks and places for people to return drugs on a nationwide basis. Right now, we have law enforcement doing it. Minnesota is at the front of the curve. We have some of our libraries taking these drugs into secure facilities. But the best would be that the places where people got the drugs would also be taking back the drugs. So we are glad that bill has finally helped in that way.
We believe this bill before us today will help even more. We also have in this bill increasing the availability of naloxone, which is used to save lives in emergency overdose situations and a number of things that are going to be helpful going forward. This bill is a framework, but it is an important step forward that the Federal Government is finally saying to the Congress and the Senate that we need to take steps here.
Our bill has the support of a broad range of stakeholders, including the National District Attorneys Association, the Fraternal Order of Police, the National Association of State Alcohol and Drug Abuse Directors, Faces and Voices of Recovery, and the Major County Sheriffs' Association.
Finally, we must also recognize that combating this kind of drug abuse will require a serious investment of resources. It is for that reason that I have cosponsored Senator Shaheen's amendment to appropriate emergency funding to address the heroin and opioid drug abuse epidemic. I am hopeful that the Senate will come together to curb the problem of prescription drug abuse and save lives across our Nation. I am hopeful we will pass the amendment as well as our bill. I think there will be a number of other good amendments that are considered, including medical education and other things that need to be done here.
I see this bill as the beginning and not an end. I think more work is going to have to be done with funding. I think more work is going to have to be done with the prescription drug monitoring. We have a start here. But when people and addicts are crossing State lines, when we have a very difficult situation with trying to regulate where the drugs are and how many are going out--I figure that if a Target in my State can find a pair of shoes in Hawaii with a SKU number, we should be able to figure out if people are getting too many prescription drugs. We should be able to educate our doctors so they are not giving them out in quantities that are too big. These are some of the things I am going to continue working on.
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