Political Quotes

“Mr. President, reserving the right to object, I thank Senator Cortez Masto for being such a leader on fighting the opioid epidemic. She is on the frontline of conducting that battle against this scourge. We are both here on the floor today in an effort to find the best solutions for addressing this crisis. We lost over 105,000 Americans to overdose last year. That is over 1 million people in a decade who have died, at that pace. And to put this in more concrete terms, we lost more Americans in a single year to overdose than in the entirety of the Vietnam war or the Korean war--in just 1 year, 105,000 people. For every death, we unleash waves of grief and hurt on families and communities that lose one of their own. Now, 105,000 deaths is more than unacceptable; it is a tragedy. And this epidemic is made worse by the scourge of xylazine. The tragedy does call for immediate, full- scale solutions. Americans need solutions that work. In developing those solutions, we must be conscious about any unintended consequences, and I am concerned about the unintended consequences of passing the Combating Illicit Xylazine Act. The bill would require scheduling xylazine under the Controlled Substances Act as a schedule III drug. And these schedules are meant to create restrictions based on a balance of the substance's legitimate medical use and their potential for abuse. It is a balance. And in the United States we actually have a process to schedule xylazine and other drugs.…”