On the recordMarch 2, 2016
I thank my colleague from Indiana. Mr. President, the bill before us is the Comprehensive Addiction and Recovery Act. It is one of the few bills on which we find so much bipartisanship. It really is an issue that all of us understand back home is a major problem, wherever home may be. In my State of Illinois, there is no town too small and no suburb too wealthy to avoid the challenge of this heroin crisis. Here is what is happening. Over the last 10 years, we have seen the pharmaceutical industry dramatically increase the number of painkiller pills for sale. One classification of those opioids includes OxyContin, hydrocodone, and other names that are pretty familiar to us. It turns out that there have been so many of these pills produced that they have now created an industry of their own--an illicit industry where people are buying and selling them to get high. When they reached a point where they can't find these pills or they are too expensive, they switch, in the same category of narcotics, to heroin. Of course, heroin can kill you if you have an overdose. We now have more people dying from overdoses of heroin across the United States than people who are dying in traffic accidents. To give you an idea of the volume of this challenge, I have been all across my State, from one end to the other, from Southern Illinois all the way up to Chicago and the suburbs and towns in between.…
