[Congressional Record (Bound Edition), Volume 162 (2016), Part 4]
[House]
[Page 5658]
[From the U.S. Government Publishing Office, www.gpo.gov]




                              WAR ON DRUGS

  The SPEAKER pro tempore. The Chair recognizes the gentleman from 
Oregon (Mr. Blumenauer) for 5 minutes.
  Mr. BLUMENAUER. Mr. Speaker, there is a major front on the war on 
drugs that is only now getting the attention it deserves. We will be 
discussing it later today on the floor dealing with opioid addiction.
  Instead of arresting or citing over 600,000 people for marijuana last 
year, which had zero overdose deaths and which a majority of Americans 
think should be legal, we should redouble our efforts to fight the 
abuse of opioid prescription painkillers and the epidemic of opioid 
deaths.
  Because of reckless marketing and lax oversight, there is an overdose 
death every 19 minutes; 78 people a day die, 20,000 last year. This is 
directly related to many heroin addicts. Deaths on heroin are 
increasing because the addict's drug of choice when their supply of 
opioids is interrupted shifts to heroin.
  2.1 million suffer from substance abuse and 1,000 people a day are 
admitted to emergency rooms for opioid related causes. We have a 
challenge that needs to be addressed. There is plenty of blame to go 
around: the drug company's marketing practices, pill mills and 
unscrupulous doctors whose government regulators were asleep at the 
switch; and the DEA, which cannot get its priorities or its story 
straight.
  I am hopeful that today's action on the floor will be the first step. 
As my friend and colleague from Connecticut pointed out, today's 
legislation really doesn't speak meaningfully to what we are going to 
have to do: prevention and treatment, which ultimately can help disrupt 
this cycle of abuse.
  There is one simple step that I think would make a profound 
difference. We are introducing legislation today to deal with disposal 
of prescription drugs. We are issuing approximately one prescription 
per adult in the United States, 260 million this year.
  There are tens of millions of these pills floating around and left 
over. And what do people do? Many of them just flush them down the 
toilet or leave them in the medicine cabinets.
  Well, flushing them into the sewer system is not a good idea because 
we are slowly medicating millions of Americans who are having traces of 
these drugs showing up in their system from drinking water. They are 
expensive to remove. Leaving it in the medicine cabinet is how many 
people find drugs to abuse. Teenagers steal unused medicines out of 
medicine cabinets in homes that they visit or from family members.
  We are proposing a safe drug disposal tax credit, which would offer 
qualified entities such as retail pharmacies, narcotics treatment 
programs, and long-term care facilities a tax credit to be able to deal 
with disposal of these prescription drugs on site.
  Locating safe drug disposal and take-back programs at pharmacies and 
other healthcare sites will increase access to this safe medicine 
disposal and will remove millions of these highly dangerous drugs from 
the hands of people who shouldn't have them.
  By all means, let's have the debate today. Let's start moving 
forward. A look at the broader challenges of treatment and prevention 
is long overdue. Hopefully, the DEA gets its priorities straight in the 
future.
  But, in the meantime, providing a tax credit for safe disposal is a 
small step, which should have bipartisan support and will make a 
difference in every community across America to end this epidemic of 
prescription overdose deaths.

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