Faces of Addiction

Floor Speech

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Ms. KAPTUR. Mr. Speaker, I thank Congresswoman Kuster for her leadership in bringing us together this evening. Congressman Guinta has really done the Nation a huge service.

I rise tonight to speak for the mothers and fathers, brothers and sisters, children and friends who have buried a loved one because of heroin. Nationwide, there has been a fourfold increase in death from opiates over the last decade, and every year nearly 17,000 people die from prescription opiate overdoses. Over 8,000 die from heroin overdoses, and more than 400,000 seek treatment in emergency rooms. In Ohio alone, heroin kills an average of 23 people every week, more than 1,100 persons per year.

Heroin and opiate abuse is not a criminal justice issue alone. This Nation must recognize this addiction as the overwhelming, powerful, chemical dependance condition it is. Concurrently, too, it is often a mental health and medical crisis as well.

They tell us the annual financial cost for our society now is over $33 billion a year, and that is based on 1996 figures. The gravest cost is in lives lost and grief felt by those loved ones whom the overdose victims leave behind.

I think of the family of my own district staffer, Theresa Morris, who lost her beloved cousin, Angelique ``Angel'' Kidd, this past July to heroin. Angel grew up in a working class family, got married young, had two children, and went to work in food service. One night on her way home, she was in a terrible car accident and was given opioid pain medicine to help her with her discomfort.

As she regained strength, she found it difficult to live with chronic pain and turned to other prescription medication and eventually to illegal substances in order to cope. She and her husband eventually divorced, and she became somewhat depressed.

As her addiction grew, the price of her prescriptions rose. She turned to the cheaper substitute: heroin. She eventually lost her job due to poor performance and began withdrawing and even stealing from her family and got into trouble. It was a horrible descent.

She died on Friday, July 24, 2015, this past year of combined drug toxicity. She was 41 years old. She was a mother, a daughter, a sister, a niece, a cousin, and a grandmother. There was no obituary in the paper, no public visitation, just a quiet service attended by those who loved her. The sorrow in her family simply can't be repeated.

I know that the time has expired, but we must simply treat the chemical dependence that these terrible opioids cause in the American people, and we must call to task pharmaceutical companies like Purdue Pharma, Cephalon, Janssen, Endo International, and Actavis, because with over $11 billion of profits from these opioid pills alone, they can surely afford to help the American people.

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