Opioid Crisis Response Act

Floor Speech

BREAK IN TRANSCRIPT

Mr. CORNYN. Mr. President, on another matter, last night we voted on a very important piece of legislation called the Opioid Crisis Response Act, which came to us from the HELP Committee; that is, the Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions Committee.

Thanks to Chairman Alexander, the chairman of the HELP Committee, and as a result of his hard work and the contributions of 70 Senators and 5 standing committees, we were able to come up with a package that had overwhelming support. I believe it was 99 to 1, if I am not mistaken.

The House has already passed its version of this legislation, so it was important that we do the same and get the bill to the President soon. I am happy to report that we have now done that.

Included in this Opioid Crisis Response Act was something called the STOP Act, which is a bipartisan piece of legislation that imposes new requirements on the U.S. Postal Service and Customs and Border Protection. It will close loopholes that are currently being exploited by drug traffickers to evade detection when shipping synthetic opioids, like fentanyl, because so few of those postal packages are actually inspected to find out whether they include drugs like fentanyl.

The package we voted on also includes a bill I sponsored with the senior Senator from California called the Substance Abuse Prevention Act, believing that we need to do something, not only about the supply side of the problem but the demand side as well. This piece of legislation is important because it will reauthorize the Office of National Drug Control Policy. We need a strategy, and we need an Office of National Drug Control Policy, not only to articulate but also to help execute that strategy.

This bill will also seek to reduce demand for illegal drugs in a variety of ways: education for medical providers, expanding drug awareness campaigns, and funding drug courts and nonprofits that provide interventions to people struggling with addiction.

I have seen drug courts in action, and they actually work. People who commit offenses involving illegal drugs can actually be monitored and given wraparound care and support not only to help them deal with their addiction but also to help them reenter a productive society.

Unfortunately, Texas is no stranger when it comes to illegal drugs. In fact, one in three Texans responded to a recent poll saying that they knew somebody addicted to painkillers. One in three said they knew somebody addicted to painkillers. Last year, close to 3,000 Texans died from drug overdoses. That is nearly triple the number in 2000. That is simply unacceptable. Eighteen years have passed, and the number is three times higher.

Experts have said it is estimated to rise again by 6 percent this year. Those numbers are about real human beings and are a tragedy. Clearly, something is not working.

That suspicion is confirmed by the researchers who are saying that overdoses are now the leading cause of maternal deaths in my State. In Texas, emergency room personnel have said that they are seeing younger and younger children gaining access to these addictive opioids, and patients are making violent threats when they are not given the prescriptions they need to address their addiction.

I wish I could say that this was just some bad movie or an episode of ``Breaking Bad'' and that we could turn it off or change the channel, but we simply can't.

This spike in drug use has occurred across the entire Nation, and it has multiple causes. There are enterprising drug entrepreneurs, some of them in China with new equipment and labs and marketing schemes and sales platforms.

Then there is the role of the drug cartels, primarily south of the border. These drug cartels' operations are increasingly sophisticated, and their income streams have become diversified, including fuel theft. In the words of one person with knowledge of this matter, they are commodity agnostics. These cartels will ship drugs; they will ship people; and they will traffic children for sex. They will do anything to make money, and they care nothing about their victims.

Then we know there is also the social isolation and breakdown in American communities that help contribute to this crisis. There are those men and women who, for their own reasons, turn to drugs for relief, either unaware of the dangers they pose or naively thinking that perhaps they are strong enough to avoid the attraction of addiction.

In many places, illegal drugs are now resulting in more deaths than criminal homicides, car crashes, or HIV. We know we have a jaw- dropping, society-wide problem on our hands. According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, 72,000 Americans died last year as a result of drug overdoses--72,000. It is incumbent on us to do everything we can, including passing this opioid legislation and working in tandem with State and local governments, as well as nonprofit groups and religious ministries.

In the Texas capital of Austin, where I live, one of these groups is called Bridge of Angels. Every Sunday, it meets under an overpass right where Interstate Highway 35 cuts through the heart of Austin. Drug users and others struggling go there, and they find people who will listen and people who will help. But if you stay on Interstate Highway 35 and, instead of exiting, head south for 3\1/2\ hours, eventually you will hit Mexico. I-35 proceeds all the way to Laredo and, of course, Nuevo Laredo, all the way on the other side of the border. Unfortunately, that interstate and others are some of the conduits used to transport drugs from Mexico right to America's doorstep.

U.S. Customs and Border Protection, led by leaders like my friend, Rio Grande Valley Sector Chief Manny Padilla, and the new, very impressive Border Patrol Chief, Carla Provost, whom I met with last week, do everything in their power to detect these poisons before they can make it over to the U.S. side. Many times, they are successful, but the smugglers are cunning, and they are driven by a ruthless profit motive. They hide drugs inside of food and drink containers, luggage, metal panels and equipment, and their cars and trucks. They are quite clever about when and how they cross the border, so sometimes these drugs get through, and then they spread.

As Chief Provost testified recently, one of the ways drugs make their way across the border is that the cartels, who are moving people from Central America, both unaccompanied minors and family units--because they know that it is such a labor-intensive job to process these children and these family units at the border because they require special procedures, many times the drug cartels will use that as a diversionary tactic to move drugs through another part of the border. So we are more vulnerable than I think perhaps most of our people recognize.

Of course, we know these drugs are hawked to children, to teenagers, and they are sold and distributed all across the country. What starts south of the border doesn't stay south of the border; it ends up in our neighborhoods, our schools, our hospitals, and, unfortunately, in our funeral parlors.

The point I want to make is the point I tried to emphasize last week, which is that our War on Drugs is Mexico's War on Drugs too.

I was in Mexico City about 3 weeks ago. Many of our outstanding professionals at the American Embassy say that many of the people in Mexico regard the drug and the immigration problem as our problem, not their problem. Well, it is their problem when more people have died of violence in Mexico--drug-related cartel violence--from 2007 to today than have died in Afghanistan and Iraq combined, and it is getting worse. To me, that is not just an American problem; that is a Mexican and American problem.

In 2006, Felipe Calderon, the President of Mexico, initiated an armed response to the cartels that were wreaking havoc in his country and, based on some estimates, now control more than a third of the country's geographical territory. Let me pause and reemphasize that. Now, according to some estimates, the drug cartels control a third or more of Mexico itself--a country of 125 million people, with a 1,200-mile common border with the United States of America, and that is just the Texas portion. Because of their success in displacing traditional authorities and usurping the role of law enforcement and government in many parts of the country, these cartels have sometimes created what has been referred to as a ``parallel state'' in Mexico--ungoverned by anyone except for the drug cartels. As a matter of fact, law enforcement can't even get into these areas for fear of being wiped out.

The Mexican legal system tries to keep up, and certainly the country has developed laws and institutions that certainly I in no way want to denigrate, but because of corruption and these powerful criminal organizations, a genuine rule of law is missing in many large swaths of the country and has been for generations.

Again, our Mexican friends say: Well, if it weren't for the demand for these drugs in the United States, it wouldn't fuel these cartels and the violence that goes along with it. They have a very important point. But this is not just an American problem; this is, as I said, a Mexican and an American problem.

I hope that I have been able to sketch how difficult these deep- seated drug-related problems are for us to resolve, but we can't--we don't have the luxury of ignoring them or pretending they don't exist. They are real, and they are taking the lives of Americans on a daily, hourly, minute-by-minute basis, and they affect all segments of our society.

Thankfully, the United States has partnered with Mexico in recent years through programs like the Merida Initiative and directed funds toward strengthening communities and empowering the Mexican criminal justice system and judicial system so that a culture of impunity no longer exists. What I mean by that is if criminals feel that they can commit crimes, including murder, and that they will never be charged and convicted and imprisoned, then there is no deterrence, and so the killings continue. We have also collaborated on intelligence matters and have cooperated in a variety of ways on providing security.

But we have to do even more, I believe, together, on our side of the border--the drug demand--and on the Mexican side. At least based on the criminal violence last year rising to perhaps its highest levels ever before seen, our investments aren't paying off, and we need to double down, working with our Mexican partners in the commitment not only to provide the rule of law and eliminate impunity but to slow down and hopefully ultimately stop the flow of these illegal drugs that are killing so many Americans.

The consumption of these drugs in Mexico, at least, is not as high as it is in our country, but it is growing. Their people are suffering severe harm in that country--harm due to cartel violence and criminals targeting politicians, the clergy, journalists, and innocent civilians, in addition to the addictions. In the United States, as I mentioned, overdose levels have skyrocketed.

My point is that the opioids package we have now passed is one way we show our commitment to address these developments. It is how we say enough is enough. Again, I wish I could be confident that our efforts will stop and fix this problem once and for all, but they do represent a significant step in the right direction.

With this legislation, we will reduce the use and supply of illicit drugs and encourage recovery of those suffering from addiction. We will support caregivers, and we will drive innovation and long-term solutions. It is a powerful first step as we continue, with our friends in Mexico, to work together hand in hand to fight this terrible scourge.

BREAK IN TRANSCRIPT

Source