Political Quotes

“I first want to thank the good Senator from Tennessee, Lamar Alexander, for basically shepherding this through and working in a bipartisan way. It is a most important piece of legislation. Also, to all of our colleagues, this is the way legislation should work. It is something we have worked on for a long time--well thought-out. Senator Blumenthal from Connecticut and everyone worked so hard on it. The American people are drowning under the weight of the prescription drug epidemic. My State of West Virginia has been hit the hardest. More than 1,000 West Virginians died of drug overdoses in 2017; 870 of those deaths involved an opiate. This is a record number of opiate-related deaths, up from 759 opiate-related deaths in 2016, which was a record that year as well. Let's put this in perspective. For those of us who are old enough to remember watching the Vietnam war on television and the outrage-- rightfully so--that came with that and the protests and how we were able to bring that to an end, during that entire Vietnam war period of close to 10 years, 58,200 young Americans' lives were taken. Just last year alone, in 1 year, we lost more than 72,000 people to a drug overdose--72,000 in 1 year. Forty-nine thousand people were killed by opiates, heroin, and fentanyl in 2017. That is an average of 134 people dying of an opiate overdose every day. It is a silent killer.…”