Political Quotes

“I rise tonight to talk about a problem that is affecting every single one of the States represented in this Chamber and every one of our communities. It is one that folks back home are, unfortunately, experiencing and, frankly, we don't talk enough about this in Washington. It is this epidemic of heroin and prescription drug abuse. How bad is it? We just learned very recently that for the first time in 23 years, life expectancy in the United States has gone down, and there is no question that the surge in heroin and prescription drug addiction is one of the reasons. In fact, the demographic that saw the biggest drop in life expectancy was among middle-aged White women--the very group that has been hardest hit by the heroin and prescription drug epidemic in overdoses and overdose deaths. Unbelievably, this epidemic is actually driving down life expectancy in our great country. It has been pretty dramatic. The number of heroin users in the United States has tripled since 2007, and the number of heroin overdoses has tripled just since 2012. It has gotten to the point where we are now losing one American life about every 12 minutes to this epidemic. So during this talk today, which will be about 12 minutes, we expect another American to die of a heroin overdose. Congress has begun to act, and I applaud the House and the Senate for that. We have acted over the last year to do a couple things.…”