Political Quotes

“Mr. President, 74,000 people died of fentanyl and fentanyl analogs in 2023. Everyone in this Chamber and everyone watching from home knows of someone who has died of a fentanyl overdose. If you watched the Super Bowl, 74,000 is more people than were in the New Orleans Superdome. Now, they didn't just occur in a border State or in my State or in the Presiding Officer's State; they occurred across the country. Every State is a border State when it comes to fentanyl flooding our country. Everyone has felt the effect of the 50,000 pounds of fentanyl that has poured across the open southern border or through the mail over the last couple of years. Fifty thousand pounds is enough to produce over 2 billion lethal doses--enough to kill everyone in the country six times over. I was just told by a friend about the DEA Museum just outside of Washington, DC. It has a new exhibit, the ``Faces of Fentanyl.'' You see walls covered with thousands of photographs of Americans--many of them young--who have died from an overdose. When you see the pictures on these walls, you can't see them, but you know the presence of parents, brothers, sisters, friends, cousins, aunts, and uncles who were devastated when that person on the wall died, when they heard the news that their loved one had bought a pill online or from somebody they happened to know. Perhaps they thought it was something else or perhaps they didn't know the potency. Nonetheless, when they took it, they died.…”