[Congressional Record (Bound Edition), Volume 162 (2016), Part 4]
[House]
[Page 5616]
[From the U.S. Government Publishing Office, www.gpo.gov]




                          THE HEROIN EPIDEMIC

  (Mr. RYAN of Ohio asked and was given permission to address the House 
for 1 minute and to revise and extend his remarks.)
  Mr. RYAN of Ohio. Mr. Speaker, this week, we are going to take up a 
package of bills that I support dealing with the massive heroin 
epidemic plaguing places like Ohio, but all over the country.
  In my congressional district, we saw, a few months back, over 22 
overdoses. In Trumbull County alone, 7 deaths; in Summit County, city 
of Akron, 56 people died of a heroin overdose, compared to just 40 in 
2013. Now, in Ohio, these drug overdoses have been the leading cause of 
accidental deaths in our State, bypassing car accidents.
  This House this week is going to do the responsible thing and pass 
key legislation and hopefully combine with the Senate legislation. But 
there is a missing piece on the recovery side. We need to make sure 
that, as we address this issue, it is comprehensive: it is about 
addiction and it is about treatment, but it also must be about 
recovery.
  So I commend my colleagues on both sides of the aisle for these 
important pieces of legislation that are coming forth. I will support 
them, but knowing that we have got a lot more work to do and that the 
bottom line is we need money behind these programs.
  The President put in his budget over $1 billion. We need to make sure 
that the resources get down to the local community so that we can help 
stem the tide of this epidemic in our country.

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