Political Quotes

“this is the 32nd time I have come to the floor in the last year to talk about an issue that unfortunately is getting worse--not better--and that is the epidemic of opioids; that would be heroin, prescription drugs, and now, more recently, synthetic heroin, also known as fentanyl or U-4 or carfentanil. Every single day we are now losing 144 Americans to drug overdoses. Think about that, every single day, 144 people. By the way, that means, during the time it takes to give these remarks, which will be about 12 minutes, on average, we are losing another American to this opioid epidemic. It is an issue that is now so serious that it has overtaken car accidents or even homicides from gun violence as the No. 1 accidental cause of death in our country. It is easy to get discouraged because we see these statistics. We hear about the overdoses. We hear about the deaths. We hear about the difficulty for people to get out of the grips of this addiction. The relapse rate is high. It is an issue that is affecting every single community in this Chamber. By the way, it is affecting our inner cities, it is affecting our suburbs, it is affecting our rural areas and every group of Americans out there. No one is immune from this, and it knows no ZIP Code. Yet today I want to talk a little about some of the reasons for hope and some of the models of success out there because this Congress, to its credit in the last year, has actually gotten much more serious about this issue.…”