Political Quotes

“I rise again today to share the story of this beautiful young lady, Jessie Grubb. She is a West Virginian who passed away a year ago last week, and she was only 30 years old. She was a bright young lady with a great future ahead of her. After years of struggling with heroin addiction, she had been doing very well. She had been sober since August of 2015. She had surgery for an infection related to a running injury and died a day after leaving the hospital. Her story of addiction is known to many. We have told it many times here. Her father David, a former West Virginia State legislator who served with me, a friend of mine, shared their family struggle with addiction when President Obama traveled to West Virginia to bring attention to the growing opiate epidemic that we are all encountering in all of our States. West Virginia has been hit the hardest by the opioid epidemic, where drug overdose deaths soared by more than 700 percent from 1999 to 2013. More than 600 lives were lost last year--just last year alone--to prescription drug overdose, legal prescription drugs. Jessie's story and her family's pain are all too common in West Virginia and throughout this Nation. As I said, we lost 627 West Virginians to opiates last year alone. When you think about it, this is a pill, this is a product that is manufactured by some of the most regarded institutions, pharmaceutical manufacturers in the country.…”