Political Quotes

“That is a rather imposing title to deal with a relatively simple concept. We have a national epidemic dealing with opioid painkillers. Prescription drug overdoses are a serious problem. We find people who become addicted. We are finding that, in a routine matter of course, this drug dependence often leads to heroin, and we are watching a chain of events. In Oregon, we found that 15 percent of young Oregonians between 18 and 25 abused prescription pain relievers last year. I mentioned that chain of causality. We are finding that people in this sequence often use heroin as a substitute when the pills get too expensive or the high is no longer high enough. It is easy to switch to heroin. It is not just a problem in Oregon. We have seen the CDC chart heroin deaths doubling between 2010 and 2012 in 28 States. Opioid addiction can be devastating, but there is a drug that can be used to safely and effectively treat this addiction. For more than 12 years, buprenorphine has been a critical weapon in our fight against opioid addiction. It can be taken on an outpatient basis. It is easy to administer. But we have seen artificial barriers to treatment. In fact, we have made it harder for doctors to prescribe these schedule III addiction treatment drugs even though it is comparatively easy to prescribe the schedule II drugs that cause addiction in the first place, such as Vicodin and OxyContin.…”