[Congressional Record Volume 162, Number 23 (Tuesday, February 9, 2016)]
[Senate]
[Pages S718-S719]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]




                COMPREHENSIVE ADDICTION AND RECOVERY ACT

  Mr. PORTMAN. Mr. President, I rise today to simply say to Chairman 
Grassley and the Judiciary Committee: Thank you for being willing this 
week to have a markup and to legislate and report out a bill with 
regard to the prescription drug and heroin epidemic we now face around 
our country. The legislation is called the Comprehensive Addiction and 
Recovery Act, or CARA. It focuses on several areas. One is prevention 
and education to try to keep people from making the wrong decision and 
going down the road to addiction, but another is to encourage States 
and provide incentives to local governments and nonprofits to use 
evidence-based treatment and recovery that has been proven to work to 
try to deal with this epidemic.
  Today we have unfortunately higher levels of death from drug 
overdoses than we do any other accidental cause of death--more than car 
accidents, for instance. In my own home State of Ohio, this has been 
true for the last couple of years. We lost over 2,400 Ohioans last year 
to drug overdoses. Part of the legislation also addresses this issue 
directly by providing our law enforcement and other first responders--
firefighters, EMS--with Narcan, also known as naloxone, which is a 
miracle drug to bring people back if they overdose.
  Finally, the legislation helps to get prescription drugs out of the 
hands of the wrong people. There has been overprescribing over the 
years, and so our legislation encourages getting these drugs off the 
bathroom shelves so they can't be used and having a drug-monitoring 
program to tell if someone has been prescribing these drugs. It would 
be national in scope, so if someone can't get prescription drugs in one 
location, they don't go across the State line to get them somewhere 
else. Sadly, these narcotic painkillers have caused a lot of the 
concern out there because sometimes they are given appropriately--maybe 
for pain--but they are overprescribed, and then someone uses them to 
the point that they become addicted and later turn to heroin because 
heroin is so much less expensive.
  This is an issue that affects the whole country. In my own State, it

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looks as if the per capita use in the rural areas is higher than it is 
anywhere else, including the inner city or our suburban areas. But no 
ZIP Code is immune from this; we are all affected by it. In Ohio, over 
the last week, there have been two incidents where people have 
overdosed while behind the wheel. In one just a couple of days ago, 
someone overdosed on heroin while his kids were in the backseat, and he 
had a bad crash. Luckily, the children were not injured badly. This 
continues to happen again and again. And of course much crime is being 
committed to pay for the habit.
  This is an effort at the Federal Government level to work with State 
and local governments and with nonprofits to address this growing 
problem, the epidemic of prescription drugs and heroin abuse.
  I encourage the Judiciary Committee to move swiftly with this 
legislation. There is a markup scheduled on Thursday so we can move 
this legislation to the floor of the Senate, get it to the House, and 
get it to the President for his signature.
  There seems to be not only bipartisan but nonpartisan support for 
this legislation. In other words, this is not a political issue but 
something that affects us as fathers, mothers, brothers, and sons. I 
hope the Senate will take on this issue.
  I was in Ohio yesterday meeting with some women who are recovering 
addicts, and they told me their stories. Many of them started on 
prescription drugs sometimes because of an accident. They talked to me 
about how the grip of addiction is so great that it requires real 
courage and real resilience to be able to come through it. We want 
those women and others to be able to live out their God-given abilities 
and not to be afflicted by this addiction, which is really a disease. 
This legislation we have before us is a step in the right direction.
  I encourage my colleagues on both sides of the aisle to support it 
and to move it to the President so we can begin to help local 
communities, neighborhoods, and our States be able to address this 
growing problem.
  I yield back my time, Mr. President.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER. The Senator from West Virginia.

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