Political Quotes

“I thank the gentleman from New Jersey for this. This is a real problem that we have. As a physician, I will tell you, we haven't gotten this right yet. Again, I am an anesthesiologist, and I have been taking care of patients for 30 years, three decades. What we still find is that we have people who prescribe narcotics and opioids. We know, by the way, Madam Chair, that if someone is given a 10-day supply of opioids for an outpatient operation, there is a 10 percent chance that they will be addicted 1 year afterward. Yesterday, my son had an outpatient operation, and he got a prescription for 50 opioid pills. I am sitting there thinking, oh my God, is there an alternative? We were taught for years that if you go to the emergency room and you have a broken bone, you are going to get sent out with a narcotic prescription. Then they did a study that shows that alternating Tylenol with ibuprofen, acetaminophen with ibuprofen, is just as good as the narcotic. {time} 1015 My God, for decades, we have been giving people narcotics, unaware that we were committing a certain number of them to a terrible life. And I appreciate the gentleman's passion about it, because we had good news in Maryland yesterday, for the first time, the number of deaths from overdoses went down. But the number of overdoses continues to increase. We got better at preventing the deaths. Now we have to get better at preventing the addiction and treating the addiction.…”