On the recordMay 12, 2016
I appreciate the gentleman's courtesy, and I strongly support everything he just said. We are in a situation today where we have a massive epidemic of opioid abuse. We are prescribing it in unimaginable volumes, and many times people are getting supplies that are far more than they need. We are finding that young people, in particular, 62 percent of teens who abuse prescription drugs do so because they are easy to get from a parent's medicine cabinet or from a medicine cabinet of a neighbor or a friend or people who break into homes. We need to have a systematic effort to be able to safely dispose of drugs. One of the problems in some cases is people are flushing them down the toilet. As a result, we are finding in our water supply traces of these medications. We are slowly medicating the American population. That itself is extraordinarily dangerous, and it is expensive for our water treatment systems. The Acting CHAIR. The time of the gentleman has expired.
