Political Quotes

“I am very pleased to join my colleagues, Senator Franken and Senator Warren, who are also here for this conversation that was kicked off earlier this afternoon by our friend and colleague from West Virginia, Senator Manchin. West Virginia does not have a whole lot in common with Rhode Island. We are a coastal State. Senator Manchin comes from a very landlocked mountainous State. Our biggest mountain in Rhode Island is probably the Johnson landfill. But we have something in common, which is the extent to which opioid addiction and opioid overdoses have stricken our State. We have had over 200 deaths per year. In a State our size, everyone is within 2 or 3 degrees of separation of everyone else. Those 200 deaths reverberate through our whole State. There is a small town in Rhode Island called Burrillville, up in our northwest corner. Burrillville is a very small town in Rhode Island. I went up there for a meeting about the opioid epidemic at Burrillville High School. In the previous quarter, in just 3 months, that one little town had six deaths from opioid overdoses. That is six times that the little police force had to respond, six times the funeral parlors had to handle grieving families, six times that death notices had to be published in the local paper. It felt like a battering to people in that community. Senator Manchin has a pretty good idea to help make sure that we have the funding to get treatment to people before these tragedies take place.…”