[Congressional Record Volume 164, Number 180 (Wednesday, November 14, 2018)]
[Senate]
[Pages S6954-S6956]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]



                         Senate Accomplishments

  Mr. President, on another subject, to people who come up to me with 
some wonderment and ask what it is like working in the U.S. Senate, I 
often say: Think of Washington, DC, as a split-screen television.
  Let's take the 30 days between September 4 and October 6, between the 
beginning of Judge Kavanaugh's hearing and his confirmation. On one 
side of the screen there was as much acrimony as you could ever expect 
to see in the U.S. Capitol--protesters, Senators upset, Judge Kavanaugh 
upset. It was a very difficult situation. That was on one side of the 
television set. But on the other side of the television set was one of 
the most productive 30 days we have ever had in the U.S. Senate, with 
72 Senators working together--half Democrats, half Republicans--to pass 
landmark opioids legislation to deal

[[Page S6955]]

with the largest public health crisis we have today.
  A lot of other things happened during that time. There was a major 
copyright bill, the first in a generation, to make sure songwriters get 
paid for their work. The Senator from North Carolina helped with that. 
There were appropriations bills which, for the fourth consecutive year, 
had record funding for national laboratories, supercomputing, 
biomedical research to cure cancer, all of those things, all of those 
miracles, and an important bill to make our airlines safer for the next 
5 years, probably the most important infrastructure bill on locks and 
dams that we have had in several years. We even passed a bill Senator 
Feinstein and I had worked on for a few years to make it illegal to 
make cell phone calls from airplanes so that you won't have to sit next 
to somebody revealing their innermost thoughts on a 5-hour flight 
across the country. All of that happened on this side of the screen 
during the same 30 days we saw the Kavanaugh hearing. I want to talk 
about the most important thing that happened during those 30 days, 
which is the opioids legislation.
  Opioids affect every single part of our country--we have established 
that--which is why 72 Senators worked together, eight committees in the 
House and five in the Senate, to produce a complex bill right in the 
middle of an election--right in the middle of the Kavanaugh hearing. 
One of the things we talked about was what do we do about synthetic 
opioids--fentanyl.
  Most of that fentanyl originates in China. Last week, I led a 
delegation of five Senators and two Members of the House of 
Representatives to China, where we met with officials for the express 
purpose of asking for their help in dealing with our opioids problem--
our fentanyl problem. We didn't say to them: It is all your fault. We 
said: Look, it is our problem. China doesn't have a user problem with 
opioids today like we do. In fact, no other country has had more of a 
struggle with opium throughout its history than China. They know how 
terrible it can be. We said: We would like for you, Chinese officials, 
to help us by doing more of what you are already doing, by doing what 
we have done about fentanyl, by controlling every form of it, listing 
every form of fentanyl as a controlled substance so that our Department 
of Justice and our Drug Enforcement Agency can go after people who are 
distributing it illegally.
  Fentanyl is a white powder synthetic opioid that can come in a small 
package. If you open the package and a few grams escape into the air, 
DEA agents tell me they are almost overcome. They have to leave the 
room. A few grams can kill you, and it often is killing Americans. 
Among drug overdoses, it is the fastest rising killer in our country, 
with a 70-percent increase in our State between 2016 and 2017.
  The government of China has already been a good partner. I said this 
to the Chinese officials with whom we met. They work with our Drug 
Enforcement Agency and other law enforcement agencies to try to stem 
the flow of the chemicals that are produced in China but then find 
their way through Mexico and Canada, mainly, into the United States or 
through the mail directly into the United States.
  What China has already done, which we appreciate--and I said that to 
them--is that they have made 25 fentanyl compounds illegal, and 
according to the U.S. Drug Enforcement Agency, when China did that, we 
saw an immediate and dramatic decrease in those chemicals coming into 
the United States. This action boosted our counternarcotics operation 
and made a dramatic decrease in the amount of those substances 
subsequently found in the United States.
  China cooperates with the United States, but our cooperation faces 
challenges when a fentanyl substance is not on China's control list. So 
the request that I made at each of our meetings was this: Would you 
please control all fentanyl substances? The Trump administration did 
this in the United States in 2017. We would like for China to do the 
same thing. That is the way to help stem the flow of fentanyl 
substances from China to the United States and other countries.
  I said to them: Look, we are trying to do our part. We just passed 
our landmark opioid legislation. It included Senator Portman's STOP 
Act, which many of us cosponsored, which would make it easier for us to 
stop fentanyl through the mail. We are doing everything we can think of 
to do, but when you do not control all fentanyl substances, what 
happens in China is, outside of the 25 you have controlled, some smart 
entrepreneur in China will figure out a different class of fentanyl and 
begin to sell it and mail it, and it comes to the United States through 
Mexico and Canada, and the drug agencies in China aren't really 
empowered to deal with that.
  To be clear, this is not a problem that the Chinese Government has 
caused, but this is a problem the Chinese Government can help us solve. 
This is not pointing a finger at China and saying: You are doing the 
wrong thing.
  In fact, they are doing the right thing by cooperating with us and 
classifying 25 substances. We want them to do more than what they are 
already doing, and they can be seen as the world leader in dealing with 
this dangerous synthetic opioid because most of the chemicals are 
produced in that country.
  On the trip with me was a very senior delegation: the chairmen of the 
House Appropriations and Budget Committees this year, Congressmen 
Frelinghuysen and Black; then Senator Shelby, Enzi, Roberts, and 
Kennedy from this body.
  We worked with the U.S. Ambassador to China, Terry Branstad. He is an 
exceptionally able representative of our country. He is the longest 
serving Governor in the history of the United States. Six months ago, 
when I first talked to Governor Branstad about our proposed trip to 
China, he said: I am going to ask you to do one thing, make fentanyl 
and the opioid crisis the primary point of your visit in China to help 
Chinese officials understand how important it is to us because we are 
working on many other issues with China right now.
  The President of the United States is meeting, apparently maybe next 
week, with the President of China in Argentina. Perhaps out of that, we 
will have a great deal. We have a lot of issues with China.
  Fentanyl and opioids doesn't rise to the top of the list in the 
Chinese minds, our Ambassador was saying. One reason it doesn't is 
because China doesn't have much of a problem with people using illegal 
opioids. Certainly, it has nothing like what we do. We know--and we 
heard and we said on this floor and we all voted for the opioid bill 
because we know what is happening in our country. Overdoses involving 
opioids killed more than 42,000 people in this country in 2016, and 
roughly 45 percent of those were due to synthetic opioids like 
fentanyl, the kind we are asking China to help us with.
  In my home county of Blount County in East Tennessee, there are 
130,000 people. Last year there were 130,000 opioid prescriptions--1 
for every person. The legislation we passed will help reduce the number 
of prescriptions. That is one way to deal with the problem.
  Another way is to stop the fentanyl from coming into our country. Our 
new law helps address the opioid crisis by the STOP Act. That is the 
fentanyl bill. The new law supports research to find new nonaddictive 
painkillers. It helps reduce the supply of opioids by empowering the 
FDA to require manufacturers to sell certain opioid pills in so-called 
blister packs. It provides more opportunity for treatment and recovery 
and helps babies born with opioid withdrawal. During this past year in 
our appropriations bills, we appropriated $8.5 billion to deal with 
opioids.
  Still, we have our problem with fentanyl that the Chinese can help us 
solve. Several of the Chinese officials reacted with surprise--and some 
not too well--when I told them most of the fentanyl that comes into our 
country originates, in one way or another, in China. The reason for 
that is not because they are not helping us; it is because of the 
ingenuity of Chinese entrepreneurs who, as soon as China lists a 
fentanyl substance as controlled, they create another kind of fentanyl 
substance and keep selling it. The Chinese officials were generous and 
respectful of our time. They listened and promised to consider our 
request. We met with Li Keqiang, the Premier; Zhao Kezhi, State 
Councilor and Public

[[Page S6956]]

Security Minister, under whom directly are the narcotics agents; Yang 
Jiechi, the Politburo Member and Communist Party Foreign Affairs 
Director. They understand how serious this is for us. They know it 
hurts because they had a long history with opioids which they dealt 
with. I appreciate the fact that they said they are willing to explore 
this. I intend to report our visit to President Trump and urge him to 
continue to ask China to help us.
  We also met with Ambassadors of other countries who are affected, 
such as Mexico and China and other countries whom Ambassador Branstad 
invited to the U.S. Embassy for a meeting. They agreed to form a 
working group to try to help make clear to the Chinese we weren't 
pointing the finger at them saying it is your problem. We are just 
saying the only finger we would like to point is saying you can do more 
than anybody else to help solve the problem.
  I want to thank Ambassador Branstad, Terry Branstad, for setting up 
the relationships we had with the Ministers in China to help deliver 
the message that opioids is our biggest public health epidemic and that 
the fentanyl flowing into the United States is the most severe part of 
that.
  The staff at the U.S. Embassy were very helpful. In particular, I 
would like to thank Steve Churchill, Rob Fordan, and Richard Jao for 
all their work.
  I want to thank, again, some of the Chinese officials with whom we 
met, Premier Li Keqiang, Minister Zhao Kezhi, and Director Yang Jiechi, 
for the time they spent with us and the commitment they made to 
continue to work with us on this public health epidemic.
  In conclusion, there is no public health crisis in the United States 
of America that compares with the opioid crisis. The most severe part 
of that crisis right now is the flow of fentanyl coming into the United 
States. What we respectfully ask China to do is more of what they are 
already doing. They are already controlling 25 different classes of 
fentanyl. We want them to control all of those classes of fentanyl. 
That frees their narcotics agents--and they are pretty good--to go 
after anyone in China who uses or produces fentanyl illegally or 
improperly.
  We saw the difference that made when China controlled 25 of the 
fentanyl substances. We look forward to the difference it will make 
when it controls the rest.
  My hope is, the President of the United States and the President of 
China will discuss this and that they see each other next week in 
Argentina. I hope the President will thank President Xi for what they 
have already done and ask him to do more. It is not China's problem. It 
is really our problem. We are the ones with the opioids problem. China 
can help us solve it by doing what we have already done about fentanyl 
in this country and doing more of what they have already done. If they 
do that, China can be seen as the country in the world doing the most 
to stop the flow of this deadly fentanyl, and the American people will 
be grateful for that action.
  I thank the President.
  I yield the floor.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER (Mr. Perdue). The Senator from Alaska.