Executive Session
Floor Speech
BREAK IN TRANSCRIPT
Mr. CORNYN. Mr. President, late this week or early next week, we will vote on a bill called the Opioid Crisis Response Act.
This is a powerful piece of legislation for which our colleague Chairman Lamar Alexander deserves great credit for shepherding through the process, but he was, by no means, alone in doing so. This bill, as he will tell you, represents the contribution of more than 70 different Senators and 5 different standing committees of the U.S. Senate. That takes a lot of careful work and a lot of determination. The bill is bipartisan, as one would expect, and that, of course, would not have happened without there having been intense collaboration. For those who like to say that bipartisanship is dead in the U.S. Senate, this bill and other bipartisan work we have done and will do is evidence that that is simply false.
In 2017, President Trump declared the opioid crisis a national public health emergency. Since then, we have seen 116 Americans die from opioid-related overdoses daily, and in places like New Hampshire, that death rate has been double the national average. In some places, coroners have asked local funeral homes to help because there has just not been enough room to store the bodies at the morgues. Let that sink in for just a minute. Coroners are asking funeral homes to help store the bodies because there is not enough room at the morgues because of the 116 Americans who lose their lives to opioid addiction each day.
People of all races and ethnicities--regardless of gender--are dying. Drugs, of course, do not discriminate. Even when people survive overdoses, they often come back only to return to the prisons of their addictions. Sometimes they rob, steal, or sell themselves in order to get their fixes for oxycodone, hydrocodone, heroin, or fentanyl--all opioids. Meanwhile, for the rest of their lives, their relationships, their families crumble. Maybe they are looking for escape. Maybe they are looking for some sort of meaning. Maybe they are veterans who are self-medicating or they have mental diagnoses that simply go undiscovered, and, thus, they try to medicate by resorting to alcohol or, in this case, to opioids. Yet the result is always the same. Their bodies can't handle the poison, and their minds' cravings can never be wholly satisfied. That is how the breakdown begins.
Drug addiction and the carnage associated with it is, of course, nothing new in our country. What is new are the types of drugs that are being created by those who tinker with chemical formulas in order to evade our current laws. What is also new is the extent of the tragedy. Overdoses are going up in many places--so high, in fact, that the average life expectancy for adult males in the United States has fallen. As Christopher Caldwell wrote in ``First Things'' last year, ``The death toll far eclipses those of all previous drug crises.''
The bill we will be voting on is our honest attempt to look this crisis in the eye, not to shy away from the ugly reality. The legislation tries, in several mutually reinforcing ways, to end what Caldwell calls the ``artificial hell'' of those who are addicted. It will supply States with critical funding. It will ensure that research is expedited and that patients will have access to substance abuse treatment. It will also improve detection and interdiction measures to reduce the supplies of illicit drugs that are being funneled across our southern border. I will return to the border in a moment and our neighbor Mexico's role in this.
Part of the opioids package involves legislation I introduced with the senior Senator from California, Mrs. Feinstein, called the Substance Abuse Prevention Act. It is one of the critical pieces of this broader bill we will be voting on. In addition to reauthorizing lifesaving programs, it is aimed at reducing demand. Of course, supply increases to meet the increasing demand, and we have to do something about the demand side in order to deal with this problem.
It does this first by reauthorizing the Office of National Drug Control Policy, which oversees the executive branch's efforts on narcotics control by developing a national drug control strategy and coordinating efforts with the States.
Second, it reauthorizes one of our Nation's most important programs for preventing youth substance abuse and keeping drugs out of our neighborhoods, the Drug-Free Communities Program.
Third, the legislation expands opioid and heroin awareness. Of course, heroin is just one type of opioid. It also improves substance abuse treatment and will hopefully result in prescribers of controlled substances being better trained and educated on the potential harmful effects of the drugs they are prescribing.
Finally, under our legislation, Senator Feinstein's and mine, the Attorney General can also make grants available that focus on substance use disorders. Some of these grants will be used to determine the effectiveness of programs that pair social workers with families who struggle with substance use disorders. We need to invest in programs that actually work, that make a quantifiable, measurable difference. So these grants will help.
Like the rest of the country, my State is no stranger when it comes to opioid addiction. According to the National Institute on Drug Abuse, Texas deaths from heroin and fentanyl--its wicked cousin--have been steadily increasing since 2010. These are real people we have lost, who have real families and real lives. Cash Owen, from Austin, TX, was only 22 years old. When he went to Westlake High School in Austin, where my daughters attended, he liked to cook for a hobby. He later overdosed on heroin. His is just one example of another life lost to this terrible scourge.
Obviously, I come from a border State and realize, when it comes to stemming addiction, it is a two-way street. We need to do our part to try to deal with the demand side and to also prevent illicit substances from crossing our borders.
ICE--Immigration and Customs Enforcement--deserves a lot of credit when it comes to fighting the opioid crisis in America. Despite some politicians' bizarre and irresponsible calls to abolish the agency, it continues to make great strides in protecting public health and public safety. For example, ICE initiated 3,900 cases for human smuggling just last year. It has arrested more than 4,700 members of transnational gangs who moved people and drugs across our border into the United States. It has seized more than 980,000 pounds of narcotics, including drugs such as fentanyl, a synthetic opioid. As I said, it is a two-way street.
Actually, fentanyl is worth dwelling on because it shows just how implicated Mexico is in all of this.
Fentanyl was first developed as a synthetic painkiller and anesthetic. It is 100 times more potent than morphine and up to 50 times stronger than heroin. What is happening is that enterprising drug traffickers and designers are taking pure fentanyl and cutting it with other substances--sometimes heroin, sometimes cocaine, and sometimes methamphetamine. But sometimes amateurs use cheaper fillers and less professional equipment, which makes the doses even more dangerous and the people who take it more likely to overdose.
There remains a debate on just how much fentanyl comes to the United States via Mexico. We know that some comes directly from places like China through our national Postal Service, but a sizable percentage is certainly snuck across our border, along with other illegal drugs, from Mexico.
According to the San Diego Union-Tribune, Customs and Border Patrol seized 355 kilograms of fentanyl at the San Diego ports of entry alone in 2017. By the way, a kilogram is 2.2 pounds. They seized 355 kilograms of fentanyl at the San Diego ports of entry alone in 2017.
There are fentanyl routes that run through Mexican cartel strongholds and head north across the border into the United States. They funnel an estimated 80 percent of the drug across the border.
All this is to say that we here in the United States are not alone because the Mexican Government has its hands full as well. Fentanyl seizures inside Mexico have risen sharply, with just under a kilogram seized in 2013 to more than 100 kilograms seized inside of Mexico last year. According to government data obtained by InSight Crime, in the first 6 months of this year, 2018, Mexican authorities seized 114 kilograms.
Of course, it is not just problems with fentanyl that we share; our heroin problem in the United States is also tied directly to Mexico. U.S. officials estimate that 90 percent of the heroin used in the United States is produced and trafficked from Mexico.
From all the news regarding the opioid crisis, we know what the results are in our country, but what about Mexico? Is this a problem just for the United States, or is this a problem for Mexico as well?
In Juarez, right across the El Paso border, a rehab center treats nearly 300 patients a day, including many heroin addicts. In Tijuana, where drug use reportedly starts as early as middle school, we know they also have a big problem. We know that all across Mexico, adolescent consumption is on the rise, particularly with regard to drugs like marijuana. But it is not just marijuana, it is methamphetamine, fentanyl, heroin--you name it. In fact, according to a recent survey, the percentage of Mexican men and women between the ages of 12 and 65 who admit to using illegal drugs has roughly doubled since 2011.
Here is my point: American and Mexican carnage is related. It is actually interrelated. That is why in recent years, through programs like the Merida Initiative, we have worked together with the Mexican Government to combat this multiheaded monster. But our two governments will have to work even closer in the months and days ahead because gangs, cartels, and drug runners are all adapting, diversifying, and evolving based on new circumstances, and we need to make sure we keep up with their innovations.
In Mexico, since 2007, roughly 200,000 people have died as a result of drug-related violence. That is more than all the deaths in the war zones in Afghanistan and Iraq combined. In Mexico, 200,000 people have died as a result of drug-related violence in the last 10 years.
Now the cartels have diversified. As someone put it, they are commodity agnostic--they will do anything for money. They will ship people from Central America across the border--adults with children, or so-called family units, or unaccompanied children. They will move drugs. Now they are involved in the fuel theft business as well. Black market gasoline is now a $1 billion industry in Mexico. They are also involved in mining, port operations, and other industries. They have multiple income streams. As I said, they are diversifying.
Meanwhile, the bloodshed continues unabated. The most violent year in Mexico's recorded history was 2017. The armed conflict between the cartels and Mexico's military, which started 12 years ago under President Felipe Calderon, now ranks as perhaps the deadliest war in the world apart from Syria. Mexico is second only to Syria as the deadliest war zone on the planet.
As that war continues--and by the way, we support Mexico's waging it--we may think that the United States has been mostly spared, but that really depends on your perspective. Fortunately, we have been spared the most gruesome acts of public violence by and large, although there are certainly notable exceptions.
The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention estimates that more than 72,000 Americans died from a drug overdose last year. I wonder why we don't read about this in the newspapers or hear about it on TV. We have somehow become numb or anesthetized to the fact that tens of thousands of Americans have taken their own lives accidentally through a drug overdose. Of those 72,000 people who died as a result of a drug overdose last year, 49,000 were associated with opioids, which include substances such as fentanyl and heroin.
The annual numbers continue to rise, with the death toll for 2017 nearly 10 percent higher than a year earlier. This problem is getting worse, not better. Experts believe the rise is attributable to opioids becoming more readily available and more potent than recent versions of the drug.
So here in the United States, we are losing lives as well. That is why the vote later this week or earlier next week on this bill is so important--it is how we will attempt to make some progress in dealing with this crisis. That is also why our partnership with Mexico must consistently be strengthened and reinforced.
Our drug problem--and ultimately the associated violence and criminality--is Mexico's, and Mexico's is ours.
BREAK IN TRANSCRIPT
Source