Political Quotes

“I rise today to discuss the need to hold the pharmaceutical industry accountable for putting profits before the health and well-being of our people and our communities. I know that my colleague, Senator Brown from Ohio, came to the floor earlier this week to call out bad actors in the pharmaceutical industry who have fueled our country's substance misuse crisis, and I am grateful for Senator Brown's leadership in calling attention to this issue, and I join him in the effort. We are constantly learning more and more about the unconscionable ways that pharmaceutical companies fueled the substance misuse crisis-- a crisis that is killing more than 100 people a day in the United States. Recent data released by the Drug Enforcement Administration showed that between 2006 and 2012, just 6 years, companies distributed 76 billion pills of oxycodone and hydrocodone throughout the country, including 290 million pills that were sent to New Hampshire, a State with only 1.3 million people. That works out to about 30 pills per person per year in the Granite State. As they distributed those unfathomable amounts of opioids, pharmaceutical companies pushed these drugs with deceptive marketing tactics, despite the known risks of addiction, to maximize their profits. One of these tactics even included pushing the unproven concept of pseudoaddiction.…”