John Thomas Decker Act of 2016

Floor Speech

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Mr. MEEHAN. Mr. Speaker, I thank my colleagues from both sides of the aisle for their strong support of this very, very important bill, which will use the resources of the Centers for Disease Control in very important outreach to young people, particularly student athletes.

Now, we have heard heart-wrenching stories all day long about the tremendous growth of the use of opioids. In fact, 207 million prescriptions were written in 2013 for opioids. Unfortunately, that has led to about 2.1 million Americans who are hooked on opioids.

And when the opioid is not available, we have begun to see them switch to a cheaper alternative, which is heroin. 450 million Americans are currently hooked on heroin.

I know in my own State of Pennsylvania we lose seven people a day to heroin addiction. We are seeing it in the important nature of the comprehensive bills that have been put forward today. We are seeing it in veterans. Many are coming back with traumatic injury and are finding release in the opioids. We are seeing it in pregnant mothers and the impact that it has in children. One of the single biggest increase is in women, mothers who are over 30.

One of the niches that is often underappreciated, but remarkably dangerous, is young student athletes. The reason being is that young student athletes are more inclined than just about anybody else to suffer sports-related injuries. Some of those injuries can be serious, and what we are seeing is a high rate of prescription of opioids for some of these athletes.

Now, in the NCAA, you have a little bit more oversight. Even there, we see abuse. Almost 26 percent of college-level athletes will use opioids at some point in time, many without prescriptions.

Where the real danger comes down is at the high school level. I have the good privilege of chairing one of the youth sports caucuses with my good friend, Mr. Kind of Wisconsin. We deal with a broad variety of issues promoting healthy activity and youth sports, but we are seeing a piece of this challenge right now in which we are watching the opioid addiction and problems with young athletes.

Eleven percent of high school athletes will use painkillers without a prescription. That is something that I talked to one of the trainers in my high school, a student trainer, about how kids who want to play in the game will hide their injuries and self-medicate. What a danger that is.

This brings me to the young man who inspired this bill, the John Thomas Decker Act. This is John Thomas Decker. I had the privilege of knowing John personally and knowing his wonderful family.

John was an incredible athlete. I watched him play football. He set a receiving record that was held for nearly a decade in our region of Pennsylvania.

He went on to play lacrosse at Cornell University in a program that won a national championship. So John was the consummate blue-chip athlete and a wonderful kid to boot. He was a great student and a great leader.

But John, like so many other kids, fought through the pain because he wanted to play. So what he did was he self-medicated and began to deal with the issue of opioid addiction.

Now, John worked his way through it as an athlete, but later in life returned again to using opioids and, ultimately, heroin. Ultimately, it led to his death.

His story inspired me to say we have to do something about it because many high school kids just like John who are playing through the pain believe that, because they are using the opioids and because they are prescription medicines, somehow there is no danger of any kind of addiction or otherwise, that somehow it is nowhere near as dangerous as heroin. Yet, it is unfortunately too easy.

In fact, one of the other misconceptions is: I don't have to worry about a dependency. But the medical authorities have confirmed that daily use for even a short period of time, just a few weeks or even days, can create the kind of psychological dependency in which there is the beginning of the misuse of the opioids.

One of the things we begin to see as well is, as the opioid begins to lose its protective effect, they will take more and higher doses in order to have the same pain-killing capacity. So they start to move further on down the chain.

Oftentimes they are able to kick it for a period of time. But when they come back, they will go back to using the opioid at the higher level than they once did before. Imagine the implication of that.

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Mr. MEEHAN. Mr. Speaker, the CDC is in a position now to be able to utilize the resources it has to do a better study of making sure that we are aware of the information and resources that are being made available to those who are in the privity of relationship with these students--these can be coaches; these can be school nurses; these can be the students themselves--and then come up with a plan for us to be able to distribute this in an effective manner, all the way down through the network.

There can be appropriate use under medical care with the kind of attention to concerns about addiction so that, where there is legitimate pain--we don't want to suggest that there is never a use, but this will now create the kinds of guidelines in which there is genuine oversight if opioids are introduced.

This will also give the kinds of guidelines to local trainers and others, even local physicians, about taking more time to assess the backgrounds of individuals that they are giving the opioids to, not appreciating perhaps that a young man may be dealing with depression or other kinds of things, a binge drinker in association with that opioid that could lead to death.

All of these things are things that could be part of the CDC's approach to doing much better education so that we can prevent the next young star athlete like John from coming into opioid addiction and ultimately leading to his demise.

Let us let John's voice be heard. Let us use this as the opportunity to ensure that future student athletes are not addicted to opioids.

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