Political Quotes

“I have been coming every week and speaking about an epidemic we have across our country. The State of West Virginia has been hit hard. I know Utah has been hit hard. There has not been a State that has been spared. This opioid epidemic, this prescription drug abuse is ravaging our country and a whole generation of our people. We have come to a crisis point. In West Virginia, drug overdose deaths have soared by more than 700 percent since 1988. We lost 600 West Virginians to opioids last year alone--600--more than any other cause of death in my State. Of the 628 drug overdose deaths in the State in 2014, most were linked to prescription drugs. These are legal drugs. Now, 199 were oxycodone related, with 133 attributed to hydrocodone. We have a situation where basically people ask: How did we get to this point? We have products that are being made by reputable companies that we depend on for lifesaving medication every day. So you have a reputable company. We have the Food and Drug Administration, the FDA, which basically is our guardian, if you will. It is the gatekeeper of whether things we are consuming are good for us and will not be harmful. Then you have your doctor, the most trusted person next to a member of your family, telling you and prescribing what you should take to make you better. So we have a runaway epidemic on our hands. We have to get this genie back into the bottle.…”