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Floor Speech
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Ms. HASSAN. Mr. President, I rise today to urge my colleagues to pass into law lifesaving, bipartisan legislation that will enable us to keep fighting the opioid and fentanyl epidemic that has destroyed families and devastated communities across our country.
New data from just this week found that drug overdose deaths dropped 17 percent from last summer to this summer. We now have a much better sense of what works to prevent and treat addiction, the resources we need to do so, and the light that exists on the other end of this terrible, terrible tunnel. But we can only get there if we keep up the fight.
The SUPPORT Act of 2018 established vital addiction treatment infrastructure. Reauthorizing this law is essential to our addiction prevention, treatment, and recovery efforts. Just two of many examples include funding addiction treatment for pregnant women and supporting first responders.
The original SUPPORT Act passed the Senate with 98 votes, and the bipartisan reauthorization passed the House with 386 votes. Now the Senate must send it to the President's desk before we adjourn for the year. This is not the time for complacency, nor is it time for despair. Nothing less than people's lives depend on us acting.
So, Mr. President, as if in legislative session, I ask unanimous consent that the Committee on Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions be discharged from further consideration of H.R. 4531 and the Senate proceed to its immediate consideration; further, that the bill be considered read a third time and passed; and that the motion to reconsider be considered made and laid upon the table.
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Ms. HASSAN. Mr. President, I will just say that I regret the objection. A Senate version of the reauthorization was, of course, included in the package that we all agreed on--bipartisan agreement in both the Senate and the House, after months and months of work, reauthorized through our committee process--and was stripped out, of course, on Wednesday at the instruction of Mr. Musk. So the House had already passed this bipartisan bill. It had huge and overwhelming bipartisan support there, and this is really unfortunate because, of course, the opioid epidemic--especially the fentanyl epidemic-- continues to devastate our communities, and it is truly unfortunate that the objection was made tonight.
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