Political Quotes

“Mr. Speaker, tonight, I am joined by a number of Members here to talk about one of the most insidious problems our Nation has faced in a long time. It is the problem of opioid abuse. We are in a crisis mode. We have now reached a point where we will have more deaths from drug overdoses this year than there are names on the Vietnam Veterans Memorial Wall in Washington. That is a frightening concept. There is almost no county, no State in America, that is not affected by this. Some areas have much more. Places in eastern Kentucky, southern West Virginia and up the Ohio Valley, and places in New England and out West have seen this as a growing problem as death rates rise. There are things we can do about this. But in order to have some discussion of what we can do about this, we are going to talk about how we got to this problem and then what we can do to go beyond that. I want to start off by yielding to the gentleman from Oregon (Mr. Walden), the chairman of the Energy and Commerce Committee, to talk about what this means in one State alone, the State of Oregon.”