[Congressional Record Volume 164, Number 108 (Wednesday, June 27, 2018)]
[Senate]
[Pages S4492-S4493]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]




                            OPIOID EPIDEMIC

  Mr. PORTMAN. Mr. President, we talked a little about the growing 
economy, and we talked about the fact that one of the weaknesses we 
have is, in spite of a growing economy and lower unemployment--all this 
good news coming with the tax cuts and tax reforms and investments--we 
have a problem, which is that many people are outside the workforce 
altogether.
  Historically high levels of labor force participation are not being 
part of the workforce, but instead people are being sidelined. How do 
you get those people back to work? There are 8.5 million men between 25 
and 55, as an example, who are not working. They are not showing up on 
the unemployment numbers because they are not looking for work.
  There are a number of reasons for that. The one I think that is most 
significant today, that puts us at this high level of people outside 
the workforce, is the opioid epidemic. I am talking about the fact that 
we have data on this from the Federal Reserve. We have data on this 
from the Brookings Institute and data from the Department of Labor and 
the Trump administration showing this is a huge problem.
  About half the people, for instance, outside the workforce altogether 
are taking pain medication on a regular basis. This opioid crisis is 
affecting us in every way. What is Congress doing about it?
  We have made progress. In the last couple of years, we have made 
unprecedented progress to combat addiction with legislation like the 
Comprehensive Addiction and Recovery Act, a bipartisan bill I 
coauthored with my colleague Senator Whitehouse. We have the 20th 
Century Cures Act, which has been very important in getting funding out 
to the States to deal with this crisis. We just passed legislation that 
provides more funding for the kind of treatment and prevention in 
longer term recovery programs that are proven to work, that have 
evidence-based results behind them.
  That is all very important. We need to continue to push back against 
this addiction by helping people get the care they need and the 
treatment they need to overcome their dependency.
  By the way, I have been with three community roundtables in the last 
few weeks talking specifically about how this funding is being used. It 
is exciting because it is being used on innovative new ideas that will 
make a big difference going forward, in terms of getting people who are 
addicted and overdosing. We are getting them the Narcan they need to 
save their lives and then not allowing that gap to occur where they go 
back to that same environment but getting them into treatment. There 
are quick response teams--a combination of law enforcement, social 
workers, and treatment providers getting in immediately saying: OK. You 
overdosed. Your life was saved by this Narcan--this miracle drug that 
reverses the effect of the overdose. Now, instead of going back to your 
old community where, unfortunately, many of those people are overdosing 
again and again, let's get you into treatment.
  One of these organizations that is funded by the Comprehensive 
Addiction and Recovery Act is telling me they are getting an 80-percent 
success rate getting people into treatment. That is huge. It is still 
too low, but that is so much higher, unfortunately, than what is 
typical out there.
  So we are beginning to make progress--closing some of the gaps, 
getting people into the treatment they need, and sending a stronger 
prevention message out there, keeping people out of the funnel of 
addiction in the first place. But, in the meantime, we have a huge 
problem, and it is not getting better in my home State. It is actually 
getting worse.
  In most areas of the State, you will now see higher rates of 
addiction and more overdoses, and the increase is almost all due to one 
thing, and that is fentanyl. This is this synthetic form of opioid that 
is now coming in and kind of taking over, pushing out heroin, 
prescription drugs, and other drugs.
  Fentanyl is incredibly powerful--50 times more powerful than heroin. 
It is incredibly inexpensive. We are told by the experts that most of 
it is coming from China--not over land from Mexico but from China--
through our U.S. mail system. It is unbelievable. It is a shock, but it 
is true. It is so potent that a few flakes of it can be deadly. It is 
totally unacceptable that in some laboratory in China, some evil 
scientist is making this poison and being allowed to ship it into our 
country.
  It is now the No. 1 cause of death in my home State. Two-thirds of 
our overdose deaths last year, we believe, are going to be as a result 
of fentanyl, not heroin or prescription drugs. It is tragic and eye-
opening that, when you look at what has happened, the Ohio Alliance for 
Innovation in Population Health has estimated that opioid overdoses 
were responsible for more than 500,000 years of life expectancy lost in 
Ohio between 2010 and 2016. It is an interesting way to look at it. It 
is tragic. More than 500,000 years of life expectancy were lost in Ohio 
between 2010 and the end of 2016.
  Overdoses are now the top cause of deaths for all Americans over the 
age of 50. It is the top cause of death in my home State for everybody.
  Increasingly, these drug overdoses are from fentanyl. In Ohio, two-
thirds of overdose deaths last year were from fentanyl. That is up from 
about 58 percent in 2016. It is the deadliest, most difficult drug for 
us to deal with right now.
  Two weeks ago, the police in Dayton, OH, seized about 20 pounds of 
fentanyl during a drug arrest. Last Friday, Federal agents in Columbus 
arrested 4 people and seized 22 pounds of fentanyl. Taken together, 
these two busts--20 pounds and 22 pounds of fentanyl--is enough 
fentanyl to kill 9.5 million people. Think about that. By the way, that 
is about 80 percent of the population in my State of Ohio, from just 
these two busts alone.
  On Monday we had a tele-townhall here. We do these on a monthly 
basis. We asked a number of questions. One question I have started to 
ask in the last several years is this: Do you know anybody who has been 
directly affected by the opioid epidemic?
  We had the highest percentage of response ever at our townhall 
meeting here on Monday. The tele-townhall response was that 67 percent 
of the people on the call said yes. Over two-thirds of the people on 
this call said that yes, they knew someone who has been directly 
affected by the opioid epidemic. That is the highest level we have had.
  One woman I spoke to on the call, Pauline from Zanesville, OH, told 
me a tragic story that is, unfortunately, similar to other ones I hear 
as I travel across the State. It was about her brother. Her brother had 
died of an overdose. Her brother, according to her, did not use 
opioids, and yet he died of an opioid overdose. She said he did smoke 
marijuana, but she said somehow there was something put into the 
marijuana that he was smoking that caused him to overdose and die.
  I hear this story a lot back home. I talked about the three 
roundtable discussions we had recently in Ohio. In two of those three 
roundtables, a police chief and a sheriff, respectively, told me about 
a young man who overdosed, who was saved by Narcan, and then woke up 
and said: I was just smoking dope. Well, they checked, and guess what 
it was? It was fentanyl that had been sprinkled into the marijuana.
  I am sure it is the same situation with Pauline's brother. The 
fentanyl that she talked about was what killed him.
  What is the lesson here? It is that every street drug--whether it is 
cocaine, whether it is heroin, whether it is crystal meth--all of them 
are now subject to having fentanyl included within them, including 
description

[[Page S4493]]

pills, because sometimes they are reformulated to make it look like 
prescription pills.
  That fentanyl is the killer. It is not that those other drugs can't 
cause you to overdose and die also, but with regard to fentanyl, that 
is the deadliest and riskiest of all. Any of these street drugs can be 
deadly. We need to combat this drug influx of fentanyl, and Congress 
has had a breakthrough recently in a way to do that.
  I mentioned that it primarily comes from China, and it primarily 
comes through our U.S. postal system. The STOP Act, which is bipartisan 
legislation that I authored with my colleague Amy Klobuchar from 
Minnesota--I see her colleague is on the floor now--will combat 
fentanyl at the source by closing a loophole that is currently in place 
in the Federal law.
  After 9/11, we insisted that all of the private carriers--FedEx, UPS, 
DHL--had to give law enforcement information about every package that 
comes into America. This was after 9/11, remember. We asked the post 
office to study it, and we asked the Postmaster General to get together 
with the Homeland Security people and to come up with an answer. That 
was 16 years ago, and it hasn't happened.
  Even though you send something by one of these private carriers, like 
FedEx, you have to provide this information up front: What is in the 
package? Where is it from? Where is it going?
  Electronically, law enforcement takes that big data and decides what 
packages should be taken offline. They have been able to stop a lot of 
bad stuff, including fentanyl, from coming through. The post office 
doesn't require that because we haven't required it here in the 
Congress. It is time for us to do that.

  I am pleased to tell you that after a few years of work, last week 
the House of Representatives passed the STOP Act by a vote of 353 to 
52. The appropriate committee here in the Senate that has jurisdiction, 
the Finance Committee, also agreed to discharge the STOP Act recently. 
So now we can vote on it in the full Senate and get it to the 
President's desk to be signed into law.
  As we developed the STOP Act, we conducted an 18-month investigation 
into this in the Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations, which I 
chair. We revealed just how easy it was to purchase fentanyl online and 
have it shipped to the United States.
  Based on our undercover investigation, these drugs could be found 
through a simple Google search. Overseas sellers accessed through an 
undercover investigator, essentially guaranteed delivery if fentanyl 
was sent through the U.S. Postal Service, not if it was sent through 
one of the private carriers.
  Traffickers prefer the Postal Service because it doesn't have the 
screening that you have through the private carriers. So we need to be 
sure that the requirement is met with the advanced electronic data that 
is on all of the packages coming in. It tells law enforcement that they 
need to be able to use big data to identify suspicious packages and to 
keep this poison from coming into our communities.
  That law is something we can do right now. The post office would say: 
Well, we are beginning to provide that information. Unfortunately, 
based on their testimony before my subcommittee, even with the pressure 
from us over the last couple of years, only 36 percent of packages are 
getting screened, and 20 percent of those aren't presented to law 
enforcement, based on their testimony. Also, some of the information is 
not helpful because it is not legible.
  We need better data. We need to get 100 percent of the packages 
subject to this data. We need to be sure we can do a better job of, 
one, stopping the poison from coming into our country, into our 
communities, into our homes, but also, at the very least, increasing 
the cost of this. By reducing the supply, we can increase the cost.
  One of the reasons fentanyl is growing so much is because it is so 
incredibly powerful, but, also, it is so incredibly inexpensive.
  Let's have a vote on the STOP Act in the Senate as soon as possible. 
I think we can do it next month. Let's get it to the President. Let's 
get it signed into law. There is an urgency here.
  As I mentioned, in just 7 years, in my home State, Ohioans have lost 
an estimated half million years of life expectancy as a result of 
opioid overdoses.
  The impact is far greater than that, though. There are families who 
are broken apart. Prisons are flooded. Businesses are deplete of 
workers because of this addiction. We talked about this earlier. There 
is a lack of workforce because of this addiction.
  The STOP Act will allow our country to push back against this 
international influx of fentanyl and will help our economy continue 
this positive momentum we have been experiencing since tax reform 
became law. We can do so by combating this newest and deadliest scourge 
of the opioid epidemic.
  Thank you, Mr. President.
  I yield back my time.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER. The Senator from Minnesota.

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