[Congressional Record Volume 164, Number 152 (Wednesday, September 12, 2018)]
[Senate]
[Pages S6119-S6121]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]



                            Opioid Epidemic

  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,

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``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.

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  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.
  I yield the floor.
  I suggest the absence of a quorum.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER (Mr. Gardner).
  The clerk will call the roll.
  The legislative clerk proceeded to call the roll.
  Mr. SCHUMER. Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that the order 
for the quorum call be rescinded.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER. Without objection, it is so ordered.