Tom Carper

I believe the President made the right call in this instance. I am glad he has done this.

There ought to be somebody in the Administration, one senior person, to lead it.

What is the appropriate role for the Federal Government?

I am going to come back to 'find out what works, do more of that.'

You know what else worked? Convincing legislators--State legislators--to pass laws that mandated seat belt usage.

The anti-marijuana fanatical message we had is not truthful.

It is not how high we jump up in church on Sunday that matters. It is what we do when our feet hit the ground.

It is one thing for us to pass authorizing legislation that would authorize programs to address this situation--opioids and opioid addiction.

When George Voinovich and I were Governors together, I was asked to be the founding Vice Chairman of something called the 'American Legacy Foundation.'

I apologize for being in and out.

I come at this as a recovering Governor, who focused a fair amount on trying to make sure that kids were born to parents who were ready to raise them.

If you continue to use cyber theft to steal our intellectual property, you know what we did to Iran with economic sanctions?

The President has put forward a very strong and meaningful strategy, which does encompass prevention, treatment, and recovery as well as data and public education initiatives around these issues.

We have done that with tobacco quite successfully through the American Legacy Foundation's--which is now called the Truth Initiative's--'truth' campaign.

One of the things we tried to do, I think, in Afghanistan, was to convince the farmers there--and help the farmers there to learn how to plant stuff other than poppies and to make money doing that.

We need to reduce the size of the 'haystack.'

The root cause is our addiction--our addictions to opioids and heroin--that sort of thing. And, we cannot ignore that.

If you just give someone one of these pharmaceuticals, which are approved by the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) and proven to be effective by research, the medication, alone, will not allow the person to actually transform their lives.

That is what we call 'the Golden Rule.'

I am convinced that we could save a lot of money here--and treatment is expensive--so are some of the other things we talked about here--that comprehensive advertising campaign would be expensive, but, as I always like to say, 'compared to…

I had asked a question earlier and General Kelly, Mr. Caulkins, and Dr. Healton took a shot at it.

Well, as we get close to the end of this hearing, I had high expectations that we were going to learn a lot--this was going to be valuable--more so than even I had hoped--so, we thank you very much for that.

But, ultimately, you are not going to solve it until we get at the demand side.

80 percent of the crime is now related to opioid addiction.

It is the number one cause of accidental death--and it is destroying families and ripping communities apart.