Political Quotes

“I rise today to tell a story of one family's tragedy but also of two wonderful people who turned that tragedy into helping others and finding solutions. On May 15, 2014, a 19-year-old Wisconsinite named Archie Badura died of a fentanyl overdose. Two years later, I met his mother Lauri Badura, who testified before a field hearing I held in Pewaukee, WI, together with an emergency room doctor named Dr. Tim Westlake, who testified about the growing problem that he was seeing in his emergency room with overdoses and, in particular, overdoses with, I think, a drug that we all heard was somewhat new, fentanyl, a schedule II drug; one used in medicine but one that had been altered, the molecule changed, and produced in China and shipped through our Postal Service and was killing people like Archie Badura. It was probably the first time I heard of what was happening to fentanyl. And so Dr. Westlake, because he was seeing the tragedy firsthand, was developing a piece of legislation that he was proposing in Wisconsin as well as on a national level. The piece of legislation I introduced in 2017 was called the SOFA Act. The reason I called it the SOFA Act--and that stands for Stopping Overdoses of Fentanyl Analogs--is because Lauri Badura, again, who lost her 19-year-old son, turned her tragedy into helping others. She was the go-to person for other families who also lost a loved one through overdoses, and she started an organization called Saving Others for Archie.…”