Tom Coburn: “coming before us today is a bill that has an allowable thing for the Secretary of Health and Human Services to control…”

“coming before us today is a bill that has an allowable thing for the Secretary of Health and Human Services to control, and it is called free needle exchange programs. The reason I am up here talking about it is we know a whole lot about how to help people succeed. Our Government is getting ready to spend our tax dollars to help people fail by enabling drug addicts to have needles available to them, to violate the law, to use our tax dollars to have clean needles. There have been two studies in North America on this subject. Both of them show there is an increased transmission of HIV associated with free needle exchange programs and that there is an increased usage of drugs. We know that that happens. We know that in alcoholism. One of the precepts in treating alcoholism today in our country is do not enable the patient to fail by enabling their alcoholism. We need to apply that same thing when it comes to drug addiction in this country. I hope that my colleagues will support this limitation on using American tax dollars for free needle exchange.”