[Congressional Record Volume 164, Number 67 (Wednesday, April 25, 2018)]
[House]
[Pages H3565-H3567]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]
OPIOID ABUSE ACROSS THE NATION
The SPEAKER pro tempore. Under the Speaker's announced policy of
January 3, 2017, the gentlewoman from North Carolina (Ms. Foxx) is
recognized for the remainder of the hour as the designee of the
majority leader.
General Leave
Ms. FOXX. Mr. Speaker, I ask unanimous consent that all Members may
have 5 legislative days in which to revise and extend their remarks and
include extraneous material on the topic of my Special Order.
The SPEAKER pro tempore. Is there objection to the request of the
gentlewoman from North Carolina?
There was no objection.
Ms. FOXX. Mr. Speaker, I yield such time as he may consume to the
gentleman from Pennsylvania (Mr. Thompson).
Mr. THOMPSON of Pennsylvania. Mr. Speaker, I thank the gentlewoman
and my chairman from the House Education and the Workforce Committee
for hosting this Special Order tonight on an issue that is impacting
every ZIP Code in America.
The gentlewoman's poster says it all. This is close to home: Life
beyond opioids, and stability, health, and healing.
The opioid epidemic is considered by many to be the worst public
health crisis of our generation and, according to the National
Institutes of Health, more than 115 people in the United States die
every day from an opioid overdose.
This epidemic is not an urban problem and it is not a rural problem.
It is a national problem. No ZIP Code, as I said, in the country is
immune from this crisis. This is an epidemic that transcends all
socioeconomic classes, and all of America's people, all of America's
diversity of families is at risk.
Heroin and pain pill addiction doesn't discriminate on age, race,
gender, or socioeconomic status. Your neighbor could be using heroin
and so could their high honors high school student.
Unfortunately, the people of Pennsylvania have seen some of the
worst. Last year, the crisis surged when Pennsylvania experienced a 44
percent increase in opioid overdoses. It is just tragic what this does
to families and how it steals lives and futures.
Addressing this unprecedented rate of opioid-related death means that
we must focus on nearly 2.2 million Americans who currently struggle
with opioid addiction. No one person can beat addiction alone, and
overcoming this epidemic will not only take a communitywide effort, but
a nationwide effort.
The breadth of this epidemic requires us to respond with a
multifaceted approach. Congress has engaged many agencies, including
the Department of Justice, the Drug Enforcement Administration,
National Institutes of Health, the Centers for Disease Control, and
Customs and Border Protection, just to name a few, to help combat
opioid abuse.
This crisis has torn apart families. It has weakened our workforce
and overextended our healthcare system. As a nation, we must act with a
unified urgency to help those who have fallen victim to addiction in
every corner of the country, and we must not forget their families who
have seen firsthand the crippling effects of this disease day
[[Page H3566]]
in and day out. I know we are not only prepared to do so, but we are
prepared to win this fight.
I have had the opportunity to convene opioid crisis community
roundtables throughout my congressional districts to hear firsthand
from families, from healthcare providers, from law enforcement, from
emergency medical services, from those who are involved in the
treatment community, and the impact is just so significant.
After coming away from these, I have also come to the conclusion,
what is important to focus on really is the substance abuse behaviors.
In one community in Clarion County, the issue at one time was opioids,
and then it went to heroin. But when the heroin started to be mixed
with other really deadly drugs and components, and so many people died
within the user community, they moved on to the new--they went actually
back to--they want to Suboxone, which is what we use to treat opioid
and heroin abuse. And when the Suboxone--those who were dispensing that
as treatment tightened that, the community found that they now had a
crisis, they went to meth.
So it is so important, as we work on this, we keep a broader
perspective of dealing with the substance abuse behaviors, because the
drug of choice will change, based on economics, based on availability;
but this, our goal should be to increase awareness. Our goal should be,
acknowledge there is a problem, and I think we have done that.
In my work in healthcare and, specifically, I worked in acute
psychiatric services for a period of time, I know that until you
acknowledge you have a problem, you can't really deal with it. I think,
across the board, in your communities, our States, at a local, a State,
and national level, we acknowledge we have a problem, and that is an
important first step.
I am proud of what we have done here in Washington, legislatively and
providing funding, but this is an all-hands-on-deck problem. It
requires prevention. That is where education is so important.
Prevention, education, treatment.
We have to equip our youngest generation with decisionmaking skills,
with discernment, so they have the filters to make better decisions
when they are exposed to access, when they are approached by others,
when they are preyed upon in terms of those who push drugs.
We certainly need to equip our medical professionals to improve how
they prescribe, how they dispense medications, and increase their
utilization of alternative pain management.
As a former rehabilitation professional, there are some great tools
out there to help deal with managing pain. One of the things that,
culturally, we have come to the point where we try to eliminate pain,
and I think that is what has pushed us with the opioids into the
situation that we are in today.
And we need to equip our communities with evidence-based treatment,
something closer to home. And so I do very, very much appreciate
Chairwoman Foxx's leadership on education and workforce issues, and
really appreciate her putting this Special Order together this evening
and leading us as we address what truly is the public health crisis of
our generation.
Ms. FOXX. Mr. Speaker, I thank the gentleman from Pennsylvania. We
all know and appreciate his background and his experience in healthcare
and the wonderful wisdom that he brings to us on the Education and the
Workforce Committee, not only on this issue, but on so many issues
facing Americans today.
As the gentleman pointed out, the health and stability of our
communities are in serious trouble because of opioid abuse across the
Nation.
Since 1999, the opioid death toll has quadrupled. There are many
estimates of how many Americans die in a single day because of opioids,
and we are so sorry to hear of any deaths from opioids.
{time} 1730
It is heartbreaking that all of those estimates are in the hundreds.
These people were fathers and sons, mothers and daughters, neighbors,
coworkers, and friends. They were real people in our communities.
I have had families from the Fifth District come to see me to share
their heartbreaking stories of family members, often adult children,
who have died from opioids. My own heart breaks for them and the pain
they are feeling for their tragic loss.
There are newspaper stories and obituaries in newspapers reporting on
opioid abuse and deaths and its devastating impact every day.
As opioids continue to claim the lives of Americans in cities and
towns across the Nation, it is our responsibility to work together to
find solutions that will bring relief to American communities.
The Committee on Education and the Workforce has recently held two
hearings on opioids, and we have learned from employers, educators,
local leaders, and addiction experts about how chronic and rising rates
of opioid misuse and abuse are impacting families, schools, workplaces,
and communities as a whole. We have heard about how the epidemic's
societal burden on households and the private sector exceeded $46
billion in 2016.
In schools, many principals attribute a recent decline in attendance
to parents not getting up and having their students attend school
because the parents are using drugs and they are not able to either
take the children to school or have them ready to ride a bus.
I am pleased to share the floor tonight with my colleagues from the
Education and the Workforce Committee, who have not only had hard
conversations with their constituents about the toll opioid abuse has
taken on their communities, but they have been having productive and
helpful conversations with each other about possible solutions.
There is no single answer to solving the opioid problem, but if we
are to bring this deadly chapter to an early close, we will need
collaboration across the aisle, ingenuity, and a uniting commitment to
bringing peace and healing to our communities.
I will once again yield to my colleague Mr. Thompson for any closing
comments he would like to make.
Mr. THOMPSON of Pennsylvania. Mr. Speaker, I appreciate the
gentlewoman's leadership on this.
The fact that we had two great hearings, which were on top of a lot
of the work that we have been doing as a Congress, this really is an
all-hands-on-deck public health crisis, and we know that because of the
work that we are doing in Education and the Workforce.
This transcends education. It impacts the workforce in a significant
way at a time when we have an estimated somewhere between 5 and 6
million jobs available in this country; and we have increasing job
growth, and we have an aging workforce which is retiring, a significant
number each and every year.
This is an issue that impacts our national security because it takes
individuals out of the workforce not able to pass that drug test, not
able to be able to qualify.
This is obviously an all-hands-on-deck because we see so many
different committees and their members across both sides of the aisle
who have been working on this, the amount of legislation going back.
One of the more memorable ones is the CARA Act, the Comprehensive
Addiction and Recovery Act, that was like 16 individual bills--16 or
18, I don't remember exactly how many--that we debated on this floor
and we passed on this floor. We rolled it into one package, and it was
actually passed by the Senate, and the President signed it.
It dealt with things from little unborn babies who were born
addicted, a terrible situation with the suffering of those new babies
because they were born to moms who were active addicts, to veterans
that VA physicians--and there are some really great VA physicians. I
don't want to paint them with a broad brush. But there were some that
were referred to as the candy man because they dispensed the pills like
Skittles is what it looked like, and their solution to everything was
to medicate, and everything in between.
Also, providing resources to our local communities so our local
communities could engage in this, great programs that have been around
for very long time like the Drug-Free Communities moneys that are used
by parents and kids and teachers and community leaders who come
together to deal with and confront this epidemic in their communities.
I have a community up in Erie County, Iroquois School District, and
it is a
[[Page H3567]]
school district that has been devastated with overdoses. Most of the
children in that school, a middle school--and it was heartbreaking--
either had a family member or knew someone who had died of an overdose.
Some of the stories you hear, and one that really stands out with me
because I have talked with this mom who was in my congressional
district, her son, unfortunately, had a disease, Crohn's disease, and
had to go through some surgery as a small child and endured that rather
well. It worked out well. But when this young man turned about 16, 17,
18 years old, he had to go back and do surgery as a result, and this
time, the painkillers they gave him he used basically one time and his
life spiraled out of control.
This was an athlete. This was a kid who did so well in school, but
his life just went into almost a death spiral, and he wound up being
incarcerated--and all because he wasn't wired to be able to handle
these painkillers.
That is a part of this battle. We need better science. We need better
medicine so we can determine who can tolerate certain medications and
who cannot, whose life would be transformed in such a negative way by
using a painkiller one time. But that certainly is all a part of this
battle.
Mr. Speaker, once again, I thank the gentlewoman for her leadership
on this and thank her for hosting this Special Order tonight.
Ms. FOXX. Mr. Speaker, I thank Congressman Thompson, and I know the
people of his district are well served by him. I thank him for his
service on our committee, on the Agriculture Committee, and all that he
does to help us write good legislation and pass good legislation.
As Congressman Thompson said, unfortunately, this problem with
opioids affects people at all ages and in all walks of life, at every
income level, every category of people--male, female, old, young--but
we particularly grieve over the young people.
We have heard about babies becoming addicted because their mothers
were addicted and of the work that is done to help those babies become
free from opioid addiction.
We have heard about the veterans who become addicted because of the
treatment that they have received. We know nobody is attempting to get
anyone addicted to opioids or anything else, for that matter, but we
realize that over the years, we have had stronger use of these drugs
than we probably should have had used.
There are many ways to approach pain relief and pain management, and,
unfortunately, in the past, too often it has been the path of least
resistance.
We do hear over and over the stories about young people who suddenly
get addicted because of surgery or an injury, and it happens sometimes
very, very quickly.
As Representative Thompson has said, it has a huge impact on jobs. We
have, right now, 6 million unfilled jobs in this country, and the
reasons are very many; but some of the reason is because we have so
many people addicted to opioids and other drugs, and they are simply
unable to pass drug tests.
We hoped, by this graphic here, to illustrate that the problem with
opioids is very close to all of us at home, very close to us; and what
we are hoping for is to find ways at the Federal level to get beyond
opioids, to help people who are addicted have some stability, regain
their health, be healed of their addiction.
But this cannot all be done at the Federal level, and we know that.
In fact, too many people look first to the Federal Government for an
answer. The Federal Government usually is the worst place to come for
an answer. It usually has to be done at the local level, then at the
State level, and, last, the Federal level.
But I know, as Representative Thompson has pointed out, many
Members--in fact, I believe all Members of Congress now--are concerned
about this problem we are facing with opioids, and we will answer the
call to do something. My only hope is that we put everything into
perspective.
As we have learned from our hearings and talking to other people,
much of this work needs to be done in the family to start with, in the
medical communities, and once people become addicted, then in the local
communities as people collaborate, work together to help people not
become addicted to opioids, and once they do get off of the addiction,
to get back to a normal life.
I know that all of us pray for those who are addicted and pray that
they will find a suitable program to help them become free from opioid
addiction, and for those who have never become addicted, to be in a
great environment so they never seek out drugs as an answer, because
they are not an answer.
Mr. Speaker, I thank my colleague for being here tonight, I thank the
staff, and I yield back the balance of my time.
____________________