Improving the Federal Response to Families Impacted by Substance Use Disorder Act

Mr. Speaker, I rise today to ask my colleagues to support H.R. 5891, a bill I introduced with my Republican colleague, Mr. Grothman, and I thank Mr. Grothman and Ranking Member Bonamici for their efforts.

This bill is part of the fight against opioids. It creates an interagency task force to study how we can take the work that these government agencies are doing and do it even better.

We have to do it better for the families that are affected, and I think the range of bills we are talking about today recognizes that. I thank my Republican colleagues for focussing on that because the mothers, the fathers, the brothers, and the sisters who have been left behind, they are our first line of defense, and they need our support.

Mr. Speaker, heroin and opioid addiction is a full-blown crisis in western Pennsylvania. It is a disease that does not discriminate. People with money, people without money, people of all races, everyone has been affected, and our people are dying every single day. An entire generation of Americans, which is my generation, will have a huge hole in it where our brothers and our sisters should have been.

Last year, we lost more than 60,000 Americans to the disease of drug addiction, and they left behind more than 60,000 families. For too long, those families have carried too heavy of a burden with too little support from our government. I can tell you about the first one of these families I met.

When I was a prosecutor investigating the death of their son, I met a family whose son reminded me of so many young men that I served in the Marines with. He was in his twenties. He was a hard worker. He was prescribed prescription drugs for an injury that he got on the job. He worked in the natural gas fields. He became addicted to opioids, and he survived three different drug overdoses.

His family kept him alive. They rescued him from the side of the road when he had been in a car with other drug addicts who threw him out when he started to overdose. They fought for years to get him into treatment and finally got him into a 30-day treatment program, where he went and succeeded.

On the 31st day, that young man was released too soon, and his mother was in a near fatal car accident the same day. He spent the day staring at her in the ICU, and, no surprise, returned to heroin that same night and passed away the next morning.

That man should still be with us today.

He was discovered by his grandfather and by his brother, and that family will think about him and be asking forever what more they could have done.

I have met them. I sat across from the father who cried in front of me and asked what else he could have done. The fact is that they are doing what they can, and if we, as a government, are going to ask them to do everything they can, we have to ask the same of ourselves. We have to have their back.

H.R. 5891 is a positive step forward. That is what this is for.

If this were any foreign military threat, we would study it in detail. We would proceed strategically with great discipline and in a bipartisan way, and that is what we are doing here.

This bill requires Federal agencies to do something that they don't always do on their own, which is talk to each other and to put families first. It also requires them to go listen to the people who are already working most closely with these families--nurses, doctors, teachers, therapists--so that we can use their testimony to make sure that this task force produces results and not just a report. That is something we have seen so far in western Pennsylvania.

Our former U.S. attorney, David Hickton, led a local working group and task force in the western district of Pennsylvania, which then became the model for the National Heroin Task Force. Within a couple of years, they gathered enough data, enough testimony, and enough momentum that that became the basis for the White House's unprecedented request for funding to fight this battle. Eventually, this Chamber got together with the Senate and, in a bipartisan way, passed the 21st Century Cures Act.

We need to harness that same spirit now. As Ranking Member Bonamici said, we need to spend more than we spent so far. This is an existential threat, and we need to treat it that way.

Mr. Speaker, I thank, again, my colleague, Congressman Grothman, and I urge all of my colleagues to support H.R. 5891.

Mr. Speaker, I move to suspend the rules and pass the bill (H.R. 5891) to establish an interagency task force to improve the Federal response to families impacted by substance abuse disorders.

Mr. Speaker, I ask unanimous consent that all Members have 5 legislative days to revise and extend their remarks and include extraneous material on H.R. 5891.

Mr. Speaker, I yield myself such time as I may consume.

Mr. Speaker, we have all heard about the opioid epidemic, and I always feel, despite the fact that it has been very publicized, it has still been underpublicized. Over 40,000 people every year die of this epidemic.

I am old enough to remember the Vietnam war, and it was relatively late in that war before we got to 41,000 deaths, and we all remember how that divided the country. There are more people that die in this year, every year, than the number of people who are both murdered and die in car accidents combined.

I am on a variety of committees, and if you sit on almost any committee, I think, in this institution, eventually the topic of opioid abuse comes up. One of the things that hits me when it comes up is the degree to which there are varying opinions on what to do with this, and it varies from agency to agency.

Therefore, what I am proposing in this bill is a task force that gets together two representatives from the Department of Health and Human Services, the Department of Education, the Department of Agriculture, and the Department of Labor to look for solutions and look for best practices. The Secretary of Health and Human Services is also supposed to appoint four other members to this task force.

I don't want this to be one of the task forces that is hanging out there for too long. They have got to come back with recommendations within 9 months, and, hopefully, we will use these recommendations by this time next year on this floor.

It is very frustrating, like I said, to attend these hearings and hear, among the experts, such divergent opinions as to how to save some lives here. We really cannot be spending more time on programs that don't work or having the agencies not work with each other.

I look forward to strong leadership in this committee. I expect that they will be taking advice from strong local leaders who have done what they can to address this epidemic around the country. We must put our full weight behind a coordinated strategy to bring stability and health to our communities.

I urge my colleagues to support this legislation, and I reserve the balance of my time.

Mr. Speaker, I reserve the balance of my time.

Mr. Speaker, I yield myself such time as I may consume.

Mr. Speaker, my final comment on this issue, first of all, for the folks back home, is that when politicians talk about resources, they really mean money. Back in Wisconsin, when I think of resources, I think of timber, iron ore, oil, gas, and that sort of thing. But up here, I guess when we talk about resources, we mean money.

Mr. Speaker, I reserve the balance of my time.

Mr. Speaker, I thank my Democratic colleagues for making this a fine piece of bipartisan legislation. I hope when the recommendations come back in 9 months, we can have another nice big bipartisan vote and move the recommendations out.

Mr. Speaker, I yield back the balance of my time.

Mr. Speaker, on that I demand the yeas and nays.

Mr. Speaker, I rise today to highlight the efforts the House is undertaking this week to combat our Nation's opioid crisis. We will consider dozens of bills this week that are aimed at fighting the crisis next door that affects our families, our friends, and our loved ones.

Mr. Speaker, as you know, there is a nationwide epidemic of heroin and prescription drug abuse that is resulting in drastic increases in addiction rates, overdose deaths, and incarceration. No zip code in this country is immune from this crisis.

Heroin and pain pill addiction does not discriminate on age, race, gender or socioeconomic class. Your neighbor could be using heroin, or so could their high-honors high school student. It is the public health crisis of this generation.

As a senior member of the House Education and the Workforce Committee, I want to highlight some of the work that we have done to help combat this pandemic. The committee has collaboratively worked in a bipartisa manner to introduce and support the following bills:

H.R. 5889, which requires Health and Human Services to provide resources to early childhood care and education providers, as well as professionals working with young children, on ways to properly recognize and respond to children impacted by trauma related to substance abuse.

H.R. 5890, which calls on the HHS to re-evaluate plans under the Child Abuse Prevention and Treatment Act to ensure the safe care of infants affected by prenatal substance abuse.

H.R. 5891 establishes interagency task forces to effectively and efficiently assist families who have been impacted by substance abuse disorders.

H.R. 5892 establishes an Advisory Committee on Opioids and the Workplace to advise the Secretary of Labor on actions the department can take to address the impact of opioid abuse on the workplace.

I am proud to be a cosponsor of all these bills, and I urge my colleagues to support them as well.

Mr. Speaker, the House is working to not only address this crisis, but combat it and overcome it. We will do so through treatment and recovery, through prevention, by protecting our communities, and by fighting fentanyl and other ever-changing synthetic or foreign illicit drugs.

No person can beat addiction alone, and overcoming this epidemic will not only take a community-wide effort, but a nationwide effort, and that is what we are prepared to do.

Mr. Speaker, I yield myself such time as I may consume.

Mr. Speaker, I rise in support of H.R. 5891, which would establish an interagency task force to identify, evaluate, and recommend ways in which Federal agencies can better coordinate responses to the opioid epidemic and carry out their authorized duties.

Many factors have contributed to this crisis, and it will take significant efforts to overcome it. Throughout my listening tour around northwest Oregon to discuss the opioid crisis, it became abundantly clear that local, State, and Federal officials must work together to address this epidemic and stem the loss of lives.

As I previously mentioned, I heard from numerous providers, individuals in recovery, families who lost loved ones, teachers, community leaders, all who called for greater Federal investment to fight back against opioids and more assistance for State and local entities that are working on the front lines.

Because of the breadth of programs required to assist families, any government effort to address substance use disorder and the opioid crisis must be a coordinated and collaborative approach across agencies. I am hopeful that this interagency task force will result in a more collaborative plan of action to address the many issues facing my constituents and the other people across this country.

I am, however, concerned that a plan of action without the necessary funding to carry out the recommendations will remain just a plan. So I urge my colleagues to support providing sufficient resources to implement these solutions.

I want to thank my colleagues, Congressman Grothman and Congressman Lamb, for their work on this legislation, and I reserve the balance of my time.

Mr. Speaker, I yield such time as he may consume to the gentleman from Pennsylvania (Mr. Lamb), who I know is very concerned about this issue as well.

Mr. Speaker, I, again, want to thank Congressman Grothman and Congressman Lamb on this important legislation and emphasize again, that once we get the report from this task force, we need to have the funding--the resources, the money--to implement its recommendations to make sure that it really helps the people we are serving. So, again, I thank them for their work on this legislation.

Mr. Speaker, I urge passage of this bill, and I yield back the balance of my time.

Mr. Speaker, on Wednesday, June 13, 2018, I was unavoidably detained and was unable to make votes. Had I been present, I would have voted:

``Yea'' for rollcall 261, the Previous Question; ``yea'' for rollcall 262, on adoption of the resolution H. Res. 934; ``yea'' for rollcall 263, H.R. 5890--Assisting States' Implementatilon of Plans of Safe Care Act; and ``yea'' for rollcall 264, H.R. 5891--Improving the Federal Response to Families Impacted by Substance Use Disorder Act.