Political Quotes

“I want to thank my good friend from Indiana for her leadership on this very important piece of legislation as well as the chairman and ranking member of the committee for working together to bring it to the floor today. The United States is being ravaged by skyrocketing levels of prescription opioid and heroin abuse. This brutal epidemic has accounted for more than 28,000 American deaths in 2014, destroying families and devastating local communities alike. My constituents in western Pennsylvania have been particularly hard hit. In the past two decades, there has been a 470 percent increase in drug overdose deaths. The vast majority of these have been heroin and opioid related. Two weeks ago, at a local hospital in my district, five overdoses were treated in 1 day alone. In February, the same facility treated 20 overdoses in just 2 days. We need meaningful and evidence-based solutions to combat this scourge. I have worked to help develop those solutions as part of the Bipartisan Task Force to Combat the Heroin Epidemic and by holding roundtables with stakeholders in my district. I strongly believe that the legislation we are considering today is another step forward in that process by creating an interagency task force to review and update best practices for pain management and prescribing pain medication. As part of its work, the task force will consider various types of data and practices.…”