Mr. President, 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…
Mr. President, 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. It has been approved by the Food and Drug Administration, which basically says what we can use and what we should consume should be safe for us.
It is then prescribed by the most trusted person who is not in our family--and next to our family is a doctor. You would think that this is something that should be helpful for us, that should be part of the healing process. Instead, it has been part of the killing process. It has no home. It is a silent killer. We kept our mouths shut; we didn't say anything for many years, and now we have an epidemic on our hands, which we are trying to control.
We had 61,000 West Virginians who used prescription pain medications for nonmedical purposes in 2014. This includes 6,000 teenagers. As I have said, our State is not unique. The Presiding Officer's wonderful State of North Carolina is facing the same challenges we are.
Every day in our country, 91 Americans die from a prescription opiate or heroin overdose. Since 1999, we have lost almost 200,000 Americans to prescription opioid abuse.
Jessie's story deeply impacted President Obama, and I spoke with him about her death and the pain her family is going through. He reached out to David and Kate and the entire Grubb family. It is horrific.
When President Obama came to Charleston, Jessie was in a rehab facility in Michigan for the fourth time. Before her life was taken over by addiction in 2009, Jessie's future was bright. She was the beloved daughter of David and Kate Grubb, a beloved sister to her four sisters, and a beloved friend to so many.
She was an excellent student, scoring in the 99th percentile on all of her tests since she had been in education. She was a cheerleader at Roosevelt Junior High School, and she was an avid runner, an athlete.
At the time of her death, she was looking forward to running in her first marathon. She had been training for that. The only trouble she had ever gotten into at school was when she protested the Iraq war, and she was on the right side of that one.
Needless to say, she was a natural-born leader. After graduating from Capital High School, she was thrilled and looking forward to her bright future at the University of North Carolina at Asheville.
She was sexually assaulted during her first semester, which caused her to withdraw from school and return to Charleston. The traumatic event that caused Jessie to turn to heroin to escape the pain was that horrific experience.
Over the next 7 years, Jessie would battle her addiction. She would overdose four times and go into rehab four
times. Until her death, she had been sober for 6 months and was focused on making a life for herself in Michigan. All of her hard work was ruined because of a careless mistake.
I introduced this piece of bipartisan legislation; everybody has been so kind on that. It makes so much common sense. I introduced it almost a year ago. At the time, I told David, Kate, and the family: This is something that should be a no-brainer. This is something we should easily pass. It was called Jessie's Law, after this beautiful young lady.
I will explain how the events unfolded, and then I will go into the bill. Her parents, David and Kate, traveled to Michigan for her surgery. They traveled to Michigan, and they told her doctors and the hospital personnel that she was a recovering addict. Jessie confirmed it. She said: Yes, I have struggled. I am clean. I am proud, and I want to get healthy. I want to get my leg injury fixed, and I want to run that marathon.
After Jessie's surgery, the discharging doctor, who said he didn't know she was a recovering addict--the parents were there when she was admitted. She told him. You would have thought they would have asked: Do you have any allergies, penicillin?
You would have thought they would have flagged it: I am a recovering addict.
They sent her home with a prescription for 50 oxycodone--50 oxycodone--because they did not know, because her records had not been properly identified, that she was very prone, being a recovering addict, to any type of opiate. There are other ways of treating pain. Not knowing, the doctor went ahead and released her with what a normal person would get for pain relief.
Needless to say, she should never have gotten that prescription--no way, shape, or form. We must ensure this never happens again. That is why today I am reintroducing Jessie's Law.
Let me tell you what I ran into. David and Kate accompanied her as the parents. They were with their beautiful daughter. They both confirmed that she had an addiction problem and she was recovering: Please, we want you to notify anybody who handles, anyone who dispenses, anyone who is working with Jessie. Please know what we are dealing with is very fragile.
I said: We will write the legislation. And we did; we wrote the legislation. If you have a consenting guardian, parent, and a consenting patient, it should be flagged. Because of privacy laws, we know we are very concerned about that. For some reason, I cannot get past the bureaucracy of getting this bill to the floor to be voted on because they are saying there is objection to the privacy laws with the parents' being involved. So guess what. I finally called David, and I called Kate, and I said: I know you would think it makes common sense that, basically, we should be able to pass legislation the way we would like to pass it--where the parents acknowledge it and the patient, who is their child, acknowledges it. They both are cooperating, and it should be done.
In order to try to get this piece of legislation passed as quickly as possible, we are taking off the parents. It is only the patient herself. Jessie comes in and says: I want you to know I am a recovering addict. Please make sure that everybody who handles my case knows that. That is all we are asking for. I am hopeful, Mr. President, that you and others will be able to join me because we don't want anybody in North Carolina going through what we have gone through in West Virginia or what the Grubb family has gone through, losing this beautiful, bright, talented young lady. It should never happen in this country.
Even the healthcare providers are saying: We need this legislation to go forward so we can identify that, so we can mark that, hotline that, redline that, and so that anybody who is handling Jessie from the beginning to the end, especially when they are discharged, is going to have knowledge. In no way, shape, or form will anybody prescribe an opiate or any type of addictive painkiller that they are going to be affected by, because their life has been changed by it already.
The bottom line is that we need to go at this problem from every angle with the help of everyone: family assistance, counseling programs, drug courts, consumer and medical education, law enforcement support, State and Federal legislation. We need everything. This is a fight we can't lose.
This is the first time in my lifetime that my State has fallen under 50 percent of adults of working age not working. We are down to 49.6 percent. We have always had the reputation of having some of the greatest workers--hard workers--giving you a good hard-working day for good hard-working pay. They have always been there. We just have too few of them. There are three things that keep you out of the workforce, basically: a lack of skill sets, if you are addicted or you have a criminal record, or a combination. Addiction has taken over and has basically changed the lives of Americans, changed the lives of West Virginia, and it is ruining families.
There is no way that her sisters and David and Kate, her parents, are ever going to get over losing Jessie. There is no reason they should have lost Jessie and no reason you should lose another North Carolinian--none of us. As to the situation where they are go in and they are identified by all the professionals with the help they need in the systems they are asking for, we owe that to every person in America, and we owe it to Jessie.
So I am asking for the cooperation of all my colleagues--the continuous support, tireless work that everyone has done. Jessie's death is heartbreaking and reminds us all that this is one death that could have been prevented and one death that should never happen again because of a lack of legislation that prevents us, because of the privacy laws, to identify a person that is in need.
If you are looking at addiction and happen to be looking at addiction as an illness, an illness needs care. If they need care, then we are going to give them the care to protect them while they are getting that care. That is all this does. I hope it is something we can do as quickly as possible. We will be forever grateful. In Jessie's memory, her parents are going to be forever grateful. Basically, Jessie's life will not be in vain. That is exactly why I am here. I am not going to sit still and lose a beautiful person who could contribute to society the way this young lady was going to contribute to society and say there is nothing we can do. We can do it and do it in her honor.
