I held a hearing in the Aging Committee to look at this issue of grandparents raising their grandkids due to the opioid crisis.

You've said that heroin is what you get when you destroy Dreamland. You've said that isolation is heroin's natural habitat.

between 2010 and 2015, the number of grandparents taking care of their grandchildren and being solely responsible for their care soared by 24 percent, and it's because of the opioid epidemic.

In your investigation, did you find that drug dealers tend to target communities that are economically devastated?

This is a whole different approach for law enforcement to take--rather than locking people up, helping them to get the help that they need.

What has been discouraging to me is despite much greater public awareness and much more money and much greater intentions that the problem does not seem to be getting much better.

Thank you for writing such an important book that offers us possibilities.

If we have gone from 60 to 51, and if we are shortening the time, and if we are drifting away from the blue slip requirement, it seems to me we are moving very rapidly toward a majority only.

Senator Susan Collins voted yes the first time around. It looks like she's on her way to that this time around, putting out a statement, lotting this Senate bill.

I don't see how you can ignore one of the most significant decisions in terms of the Middle East.

I agree with your statement that we haven't gotten there, but nobody has come up with an alternative for solving this problem that would maintain Israel as a democratic Jewish state.

This decision that is being made tomorrow is terrible on a lot of levels.

I completely agree with you that this monopoly is being used to protect profits rather than patients and R&D development of new drugs.

An issue that I brought up at previous hearings, as my colleague Senator Paul has mentioned, is the imposition of gag clauses on pharmacists.

I find this hearing fascinating because this is an issue I've been wrestling with for 30 years. I've been an environmental advocate, a developer, a governor, and an administrator.

My concern is that in this situation we see the pendulum swinging back and forth to excessive and untimely regulation that impedes responsible development, but we don't want to swing back to the point where we open the floodgates to…

it's often easy, politically, to talk about shrinking the government, and hiring freezes, and fewer people.

you can't on the one hand talk about a more efficient permitting process and on the other hand talk about firing people and shrinking the size of government.