Bob Casey

I thought Senator McCaskill put it very well when she said that if you had that pattern in robberies, law enforcement would be all over it.

We need mandatory, mandatory, mandatory prescription monitoring.

It is important for us to hear the nature of it, but also the duration of it, and we have to figure out ways to support that.

We all say that, but I am not sure those of us who are not professionals or have experience with it fully understand what we are saying or the meaning of it.

Thank you for participating here at Allegheny General Hospital.

We have to look at that as a problem in its own right.

I hope you can take a look at it, Senate bill 1455, which would lift that cap.

We need to really make sure there are adequate treatment options that are available to people in a timely fashion.

So how do you deal with that price dynamic where, if you are aggressive on opioids and the price goes up, they will turn to heroin?

Naloxone is a remarkable advancement. Here you can literally, at the scene of an overdose, be able to reverse that horrific consequence. It is a lifesaver. It is a wonderful innovation.

We absolutely have to hit this head-on.

Senate bill 1410 would increase the block grant funding, the so-called Substance Abuse Prevention and Treatment Block Grant.

Over 5 years, 3,000 people in this State have died either by way of opioid problems or heroin.

This is a problem and a challenge for our country that knows no geographic or political boundaries.

I know that he and I both care very, very deeply about this very, very pressing problem that is occurring all across the Commonwealth and, in fact, across our country.

I have been to a couple of places in this State over the last couple of months where we are seeing the manifestation of what a lot of advocates and a lot of experts in this room would tell us over and over again: good treatment works, but…

Senator Toomey outlined that we have a number of legislative proposals.

It seems to me that stopping this epidemic and healing our communities will require at least a three-pronged approach.

Thank you, Senator Toomey and Senator Casey, for your leadership on this issue.

I appreciate Senator Casey's support of those efforts and his comments regarding that.

A prescription medication database is a huge asset. We need to know who is getting what.

I did, but just maybe I will do it by way of a lightening round because I took more than my time last time.

I hope we can work on that so we make it more readily available.

The fact is, as Dr. Farah mentioned, more Pennsylvanians will die this year from overdoses and misuse just of heroin and prescription painkillers than from influenza or homicide.

We need to have a mandatory REMS project, a Risk, Evaluation, and Mitigation Strategy, that is mandatory for physicians to take if they want to prescribe opioids across the class.