Roy Blunt: “I am here today with my colleague Senator Capito to talk about something that is getting a lot of attention but needs…”

“I am here today with my colleague Senator Capito to talk about something that is getting a lot of attention but needs even more attention from this Congress, which is the opioid epidemic--the epidemic the President has rightly called a crisis, and he then turned to Congress and said: Find the money to solve the problem. We have been doing a substantial amount of that, but I think we see a clear desire here and in all of our States to find a better solution. This is an issue that has hit every town in America, small and large, I believe. According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, over 40,000 people died from an opioid overdose. This is a fraction of the people who had an opioid overdose. These are the people who died from an opioid overdose in 2016, 40,000 people; over 90 Americans every single day. It was a 28-percent increase over 2015 and a dramatic increase over where we were just 10 years before. Opioid overdoses now surpass car accidents as the No. 1 accidental cause of death in the country. Both of our States and our surrounding States, I think almost every one of them, have had more overdose deaths in 2016--and an increased number, I think, in 2017--than car accident deaths. The Centers for Disease Control estimates the economic burden of this epidemic is almost $80 billion a year. We have just gone through a tax discussion, an economic growth discussion.…”