Rob Portman

Mr. PORTMAN

Mr. PORTMAN. Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that the Select Committee on Intelligence be authorized to meet during the session of the Senate on September 8, 2016, at 2 p.m., in room SH-219 of the Hart Senate Office Building.

Mr. PORTMAN

Mr. PORTMAN. Mr. President, I rise to talk about an epidemic that is affecting my State of Ohio and every State represented in this Chamber. Senator Whitehouse just spoke. He worked with me over a period of about 3 years to put together legislation to address the heroin and prescription drug epidemic. We had five conferences in Washington, DC, bringing in experts from around the country, including from my home State of Ohio. We looked at what is working and what is not working and came up with the best practices from around the country. That is what the legislation addresses. It is comprehensive. It deals with prevention and education. It deals with treatment. It deals with recovery. We learned longer term recovery was incredibly important to success. It actually passed this body with a vote of 92 to 2. That never happens around here. It is because working together with both sides of the aisle we were able to look at a problem objectively, take the politics out of it, and figure out what would work to help turn the tide. It is something that is urgent. We have to address it. I will tell you now nationally it appears overdose deaths from these opioids, heroin, prescription drugs, and now synthetic heroin is the No. 1 cause of accidental death, meaning it has surpassed car accidents. Sadly, it is getting worse, not better. So those changes this Congress voted on to modernize our Federal response to prescription drug and heroin addiction are incredibly important right now. It was evidence-based. It was something where we again took best practices to make sure we were spending more money, but that money was going to places where it was proven to work. Now that CARA is law--the Comprehensive Addiction and Recovery Act, and it was signed into law by the President about 6 weeks ago--we are working with the administration to get it implemented as quickly as possible because there are a number of new programs, new funding sources. It authorizes another $181 million per year on top of what is already being spent on this issue. Again, importantly, it authorizes new programs that we think will work better to reverse the tide, to get at the horrible epidemic that is growing in our States. We also need to work with the administration and with Congress to ensure that in the annual funding bills that are passed around here, we are fully funding this new effort. At the year end, which is September 30, fiscal year end for the U.S. Government, there will be a funding mechanism. It is probably going to be what is called a continuing resolution, continuing funding from last year. That is good in one sense, because we did get more funding in this year's appropriations bill for this issue. We have about a 47- percent increase in funding for this year. So that would continue next year, but that is not enough. Unfortunately, this crisis has taken hold in a way--it has gripped our country in a way that we need more. Just to be able to fully fund the CARA legislation, we need more. So we are calling on the administration to work with us to ensure that we can get more funding into whatever is going to be passed at the end of this month, likely again a continuing resolution, to provide adequate funding to ensure that at a minimum we are funding what is in the CARA legislation. When there is a new appropriation for next year, which I assume will happen after the election, we also have hope because both the committee in the House and the committee in the Senate went through all their process, and they reported out of committee legislation that doubles the funding for opioids over a 2-year period. They included funding that is at $471 million, a 113-percent increase over the last 2 years. So we need to have a process to get this funding done. We hope the administration will work with us on that, even in this continuing resolution. There is a group of 100 different organizations from around the country. It is a coalition that helped pass CARA that has recently sent a letter to the White House. It includes recovery advocacy groups, it includes prevention groups, and it includes law enforcement. This group of people who are on the frontlines, in the trenches all around the country, just sent a letter to the White House thanking the President for signing CARA into law but also expressing their support for fully funding it. What they specifically asked for was that the White House include what is called an anomaly or an add-on to the continuing resolution for this purpose. I hope the White House is listening. I hope they do it. I want to add voice to this coalition, to say this is the right thing to do. I have also brought this up with our leadership in the Congress. There will be some add-ons or anomalies to any continuing resolution. There always are. We have to be sure it is transparent, that they make sense. This one makes sense. We should make it transparent but also make it high enough so it fully funds the CARA legislation, regardless of what happens with the appropriations bills going forward. At the very least, let's close whatever gap there is between what is in the CR and what is needed to fully fund this legislation. Because I believe this is a crisis and an emergency, I actually would support emergency funding, going over and above what is in the CARA legislation. I think we should have a debate on that issue. We had one on the Senate floor. I voted for that. We were not able to get 60 votes for it, but I do think it is an issue that rises to that extraordinary level, like the Ebola issue, like the Zika virus, issues that are truly epidemics. This is. Let me tell you why I call it an epidemic. We found out recently that drug overdose deaths in my home State of Ohio increased from about 2,500 deaths in 2014 to more than 3,000 in 2015, an increase of 20 percent in just 1 year. Here is the sad news. This year, we are on track to exceed that percentage increase. In other words, we are on track this year to have better than a 20-percent increase in deaths from overdoses in Ohio. The Presiding Officer's State is probably experiencing the same thing. Nationwide, the number of heroin users tripled in just 7 years, and the number of drug overdoses every year tripled in just 4 years. Since 2000, the number of annual opioid overdoses has quadrupled. So this problem is getting worse, not better. One reason these overdoses are increasing even faster than the number of new users is that the drugs on the street are getting stronger and stronger. So you are seeing not just more addiction, but you are seeing even higher levels of overdoses--more addictive, more dangerous, and more deadly. Heroin is already deadly enough. It is extremely addictive, but it is now being laced with drugs like fentanyl, carfentanil, and U-4. You may have heard of this and wondered what it was. Well, it is a synthetic form of heroin. It is being made somewhere in a laboratory and being added often to heroin to poison the people we represent. It is that simple. Carfentanil, fentanyl, and U-4 are more dangerous. In Ohio, fentanyl deaths increased nearly fivefold, from 80 in 2013 to about 500 in 2014--more than doubled to over 1,000 last year. Again, this year, we are on track to exceed that number significantly. Just 3 years ago, about 1 in 20 overdoses in Ohio were a result of fentanyl. Then it was one in five. Now it is more than one in three. You can see where this is going. Prescription drugs are often the start of this. Four out of five heroin addicts in Ohio, they say, started with prescriptions drugs. This is an addiction that sometimes is inadvertent in the sense that someone might have a medical procedure and then be given these narcotic pain pills and develop this addiction, which is a physiological change in your brain. Addiction is a disease. It needs to be treated as such. Increasingly now we are seeing these synthetic heroins come into our communities to the point that 1 in 3 overdoses now, instead of just 3 years ago 1 in 20--in Ohio--are due to these synthetic drugs. In my hometown of Cincinnati now, those fentanyl overdoses exceed the heroin overdoses. According to Dr. Lakshmi Sammarco, who is Hamilton County coroner in Southwest Ohio, drug overdose deaths in Hamilton County increased by 40 percent from just 2014 to 2015, while fentanyl overdose deaths increased 153 percent. By the way, Dr. Sammarco and her medical team are doing an excellent job in very difficult circumstances. They are on top of this epidemic, but they need our help. These synthetic drugs are incredibly powerful. Heroin is already extremely addictive, as I said, and typically much cheaper, stronger, and more widely available than these prescription painkillers we talked about. Fentanyl can be 50, sometimes even 100, times as powerful as heroin. Think about that. Carfentanil is sometimes 10,000 times as powerful as morphine. So, as you can see, as these synthetic drugs are coming into our communities, they are more dangerous, they are stronger, they are more addictive. Carfentanil is so powerful, it is primarily used as a tranquilizer for large animals such as elephants. It is so powerful that in cases where the police who have responded to an overdose have overdosed from just breathing fentanyl in the air or getting it on their skin at the scene. It is so powerful that sometimes multiple doses of Narcan are required to reverse an overdose. Narcan is this miracle drug that our first responders increasingly are carrying, and thank God it is there because it reverses the effects of the overdose, but Narcan is meant for a heroin overdose. Sometimes with these synthetic drugs like fentanyl and carfentanil and U-4, you need several doses of Narcan to reverse the overdose, and sometimes it does not work. I have heard cases where seven doses of Narcan were necessary to save someone's life. These synthetic drugs are taking a heavy toll on our country and my State of Ohio. In particular, in my hometown in Ohio recently--Cincinnati, OH--in just one 6-day span in August it had 174 overdoses: 6 days, 174 overdoses in one city. That is less than 1 week in one city: 174. It is unprecedented, at least in our State. Dr. Sammarco has confirmed this sudden spike in overdoses is the result of heroin being laced with other drugs. At least in many of these cases it is carfentanil. So somebody is actually putting this large-animal tranquilizer into the heroin, mixing it, resulting in this huge spike in overdoses. I was glad to be helpful in providing a sample of carfentanil for Coroner Sammarco, because she could not find it anywhere in the region easily. Once she found it, we were able to get the comparison of the sample to what had happened and be able to confirm that carfentanil was behind these huge increases in overdoses. Our first responders deserve our praise because they were able to save the vast majority of these lives. So over 170 people overdosing, and yet, sadly, tragically, although there were four or five people who died, the rest of these people, over 170 people were saved. That is amazing. It is because they responded quickly. They responded professionally. Last Wednesday I went to Fire Station 24 in Cincinnati, OH, which handled the largest number of these overdoses--1 fire station, 34 overdoses in 6 days. They talked to me about how they saved lives. I thanked them, of course, for what they are doing every day. One thing they said to me was: Senator, this is not the answer. Saving people by using Narcan is necessary, it is absolutely necessary, but they said it is not the answer. I agree with them. The answer is getting people into treatment, getting them back on track, getting them into longer term recovery rather than applying Narcan again and again, as they tell me, sometimes to the same person. By the way, this epidemic is taking a toll on our firefighters and other first responders--police officers also. As we said, it has made their jobs more dangerous. It is also taking more of their time and resources. Last year the number we have is that firefighters and other first responders applied Narcan 16,000 times in one State. This year it will be far higher than that. By the way, this is why CARA provides training for Narcan, the legislation we talked about earlier, the Comprehensive Addiction and Recovery Act. It also provides more resources to our first responders to purchase Narcan. Narcan is getting more expensive, in part, because there is an increased demand. We have to be sure there are not any other reasons that those expenses are going up, and we have to be sure to provide the resources to our first responders so they can have these lifesaving drugs on hand. By the way, firefighters all over Ohio tell me the same thing, and I have talked to a number of them. I have gone to other firehouses, and I ask the same question everywhere I go: Are you going on more fire runs or more overdose runs? The answer now--consistently, everywhere I go-- is overdoses. There are more overdoses than fire runs in every firehouse I have been to in Ohio. The scenes they encounter when they go on these runs are truly heartbreaking. They see families torn apart. During that unprecedented 6-day period in Cincinnati, they saved the lives of two parents who had overdosed in front of their two teenage sons. Last week in West Chester Township, OH, outside of Cincinnati, police saved the lives of a father and son who together overdosed on heroin while the father was driving on Interstate I-75. Thank God no one else was injured or killed. A few days later, in Forest Park, OH, outside of Cincinnati, a 3- year-old girl found her grandmother, who was babysitting her, unconscious from an overdose. When police arrived with Narcan to save her grandmother's life, the story from the police officer was the little girl asked one of the police officers to please hold her while her grandmother was unconscious on the floor. It is heartbreaking. Forest Park police responded to five other overdoses that same day, including another overdose in the same apartment complex. This is a small town with a population of about 19,000 people. Two weeks ago, the Akron Beacon Journal published a letter from a high school girl from Akron to her dad, who was addicted to heroin. She writes to her dad, in part: When I found out you got arrested, I was happy. . . . I was going to finally be able to sleep at night without having to worry about whether I was going to get a call the next day telling me that [heroin] had finally taken you away. I know that being in prison isn't the best life, but at least you are alive. . . . This is what heroin does: it possesses its victim and does not let go until he is dead. To that high school girl, what we hope is that her father goes through a drug court, can get into treatment, can get into longer term recovery, reunite with his family, and get back to his life. We know that many of the drugs that are causing so many of these overdoses in Ohio--the fentanyl, the Carfentanil, the U-4--don't come from Ohio. In fact, they don't come from any State in this body; they come from other countries. Incidentally, it doesn't mean that someday they couldn't come from this country, but right now they are coming from other countries. From all the information we have from law enforcement, we believe the vast majority of these synthetic drugs are being made in laboratories in China and in India and then shipped through the mail to our communities to meet this growing demand for drugs. The traffickers actually get this poison, this synthetic drug, through the U.S. mail system. Right now, it is difficult to detect these packages coming from overseas before it is way too late. Unlike private carriers such as UPS, FedEx, or others, the Postal Service does not require electronic Customs data for packages coming into the country, so we don't know what is coming in. This makes dangerous packages containing drugs such as fentanyl or Carfentanil or U-4 that much harder to stop. We have had hearings on this issue in the Senate. In June, the Judiciary Committee held a hearing on synthetic drugs. A witness testified that because of this loophole of the Postal Service not requiring the information but the private carriers requiring it, getting these drugs into our communities was easier and that the drug traffickers used the mail system. To me, it is a loophole. The Homeland Security Committee on which I sit has also held hearings and a roundtable discussion on the flow of fentanyl and other synthetic forms of heroin into this country. We learned the same thing--that there is this discrepancy between how the mail system handles it and how private carriers handle it. Today I have introduced legislation to address the threat of synthetic drugs by simply closing that loophole, simply saying that with regard to packages coming from overseas, the Postal Service should require advanced electronic data so we know what is in these packages. This would include information such as who and where it is coming from, where it is going, and what is in it. As Customs and Border Patrol--the border protection people--has told us, this information will provide a much better tool to law enforcement to help them ensure that these dangerous drugs won't end up in the hands of drug traffickers who then sell these dangerous drugs in our communities. It will make our streets safer and save lives by helping to prevent overdoses. I think it is a commonsense idea that builds on CARA, the Comprehensive Addiction and Recovery Act, because while CARA addresses the demand for drugs through prevention, education, treatment, and recovery, this legislation will help to cut the supply of drugs, help to cut off the flow of this poison into our communities. I think these two ideas go hand in hand. If you are one of the 92 Senators in this body, out of 100, who voted for CARA, I hope you will support this legislation too. Our law enforcement and first responders are doing an amazing job. They are saving lives every single day, and they are to be commended, but they need some help. They deserve our best efforts to stop these dangerous drugs from entering into the country in the first place, and so do the hundreds of thousands of families in Ohio and around the country who have been affected by this epidemic of addiction. They deserve our help as well. They deserve a safer community. They deserve peace of mind. They deserve to know that we are doing all we can to try to keep these dangerous synthetic drugs out of our communities. Just as I did with the CARA legislation, I urge my colleagues on both sides of the aisle to support this additional legislation. Frankly, 3\1/2\ years ago when we started putting together the CARA legislation, if this synthetic drug issue had been at the level it is today, I believe it would have been included in the CARA legislation. But we are now seeing this epidemic growing--heroin and prescription drugs, yes, but increasingly synthetic drugs, as we talked about this evening. It is time for us to be sure we are doing all we can to keep this poison out of our communities.

Mr. PORTMAN

Mr. PORTMAN. Mr. President, I suggest the absence of a quorum.

Mr. PORTMAN

Mr. PORTMAN. Mr. President, I rise to talk about an epidemic that is affecting my State of Ohio and every State represented in this Chamber. Senator Whitehouse just spoke. He worked with me over a period of about 3 years to put together legislation to address the heroin and prescription drug epidemic. We had five conferences in Washington, DC, bringing in experts from around the country, including from my home State of Ohio. We looked at what is working and what is not working and came up with the best practices from around the country. That is what the legislation addresses. It is comprehensive. It deals with prevention and education. It deals with treatment. It deals with recovery. We learned longer term recovery was incredibly important to success. It actually passed this body with a vote of 92 to 2. That never happens around here. It is because working together with both sides of the aisle we were able to look at a problem objectively, take the politics out of it, and figure out what would work to help turn the tide. It is something that is urgent. We have to address it. I will tell you now nationally it appears overdose deaths from these opioids, heroin, prescription drugs, and now synthetic heroin is the No. 1 cause of accidental death, meaning it has surpassed car accidents. Sadly, it is getting worse, not better. So those changes this Congress voted on to modernize our Federal response to prescription drug and heroin addiction are incredibly important right now. It was evidence-based. It was something where we again took best practices to make sure we were spending more money, but that money was going to places where it was proven to work. Now that CARA is law--the Comprehensive Addiction and Recovery Act, and it was signed into law by the President about 6 weeks ago--we are working with the administration to get it implemented as quickly as possible because there are a number of new programs, new funding sources. It authorizes another $181 million per year on top of what is already being spent on this issue. Again, importantly, it authorizes new programs that we think will work better to reverse the tide, to get at the horrible epidemic that is growing in our States. We also need to work with the administration and with Congress to ensure that in the annual funding bills that are passed around here, we are fully funding this new effort. At the year end, which is September 30, fiscal year end for the U.S. Government, there will be a funding mechanism. It is probably going to be what is called a continuing resolution, continuing funding from last year. That is good in one sense, because we did get more funding in this year's appropriations bill for this issue. We have about a 47- percent increase in funding for this year. So that would continue next year, but that is not enough. Unfortunately, this crisis has taken hold in a way--it has gripped our country in a way that we need more. Just to be able to fully fund the CARA legislation, we need more. So we are calling on the administration to work with us to ensure that we can get more funding into whatever is going to be passed at the end of this month, likely again a continuing resolution, to provide adequate funding to ensure that at a minimum we are funding what is in the CARA legislation. When there is a new appropriation for next year, which I assume will happen after the election, we also have hope because both the committee in the House and the committee in the Senate went through all their process, and they reported out of committee legislation that doubles the funding for opioids over a 2-year period. They included funding that is at $471 million, a 113-percent increase over the last 2 years. So we need to have a process to get this funding done. We hope the administration will work with us on that, even in this continuing resolution. There is a group of 100 different organizations from around the country. It is a coalition that helped pass CARA that has recently sent a letter to the White House. It includes recovery advocacy groups, it includes prevention groups, and it includes law enforcement. This group of people who are on the frontlines, in the trenches all around the country, just sent a letter to the White House thanking the President for signing CARA into law but also expressing their support for fully funding it. What they specifically asked for was that the White House include what is called an anomaly or an add-on to the continuing resolution for this purpose. I hope the White House is listening. I hope they do it. I want to add voice to this coalition, to say this is the right thing to do. I have also brought this up with our leadership in the Congress. There will be some add-ons or anomalies to any continuing resolution. There always are. We have to be sure it is transparent, that they make sense. This one makes sense. We should make it transparent but also make it high enough so it fully funds the CARA legislation, regardless of what happens with the appropriations bills going forward. At the very least, let's close whatever gap there is between what is in the CR and what is needed to fully fund this legislation. Because I believe this is a crisis and an emergency, I actually would support emergency funding, going over and above what is in the CARA legislation. I think we should have a debate on that issue. We had one on the Senate floor. I voted for that. We were not able to get 60 votes for it, but I do think it is an issue that rises to that extraordinary level, like the Ebola issue, like the Zika virus, issues that are truly epidemics. This is. Let me tell you why I call it an epidemic. We found out recently that drug overdose deaths in my home State of Ohio increased from about 2,500 deaths in 2014 to more than 3,000 in 2015, an increase of 20 percent in just 1 year. Here is the sad news. This year, we are on track to exceed that percentage increase. In other words, we are on track this year to have better than a 20-percent increase in deaths from overdoses in Ohio. The Presiding Officer's State is probably experiencing the same thing. Nationwide, the number of heroin users tripled in just 7 years, and the number of drug overdoses every year tripled in just 4 years. Since 2000, the number of annual opioid overdoses has quadrupled. So this problem is getting worse, not better. One reason these overdoses are increasing even faster than the number of new users is that the drugs on the street are getting stronger and stronger. So you are seeing not just more addiction, but you are seeing even higher levels of overdoses--more addictive, more dangerous, and more deadly. Heroin is already deadly enough. It is extremely addictive, but it is now being laced with drugs like fentanyl, carfentanil, and U-4. You may have heard of this and wondered what it was. Well, it is a synthetic form of heroin. It is being made somewhere in a laboratory and being added often to heroin to poison the people we represent. It is that simple. Carfentanil, fentanyl, and U-4 are more dangerous. In Ohio, fentanyl deaths increased nearly fivefold, from 80 in 2013 to about 500 in 2014--more than doubled to over 1,000 last year. Again, this year, we are on track to exceed that number significantly. Just 3 years ago, about 1 in 20 overdoses in Ohio were a result of fentanyl. Then it was one in five. Now it is more than one in three. You can see where this is going. Prescription drugs are often the start of this. Four out of five heroin addicts in Ohio, they say, started with prescriptions drugs. This is an addiction that sometimes is inadvertent in the sense that someone might have a medical procedure and then be given these narcotic pain pills and develop this addiction, which is a physiological change in your brain. Addiction is a disease. It needs to be treated as such. Increasingly now we are seeing these synthetic heroins come into our communities to the point that 1 in 3 overdoses now, instead of just 3 years ago 1 in 20--in Ohio--are due to these synthetic drugs. In my hometown of Cincinnati now, those fentanyl overdoses exceed the heroin overdoses. According to Dr. Lakshmi Sammarco, who is Hamilton County coroner in Southwest Ohio, drug overdose deaths in Hamilton County increased by 40 percent from just 2014 to 2015, while fentanyl overdose deaths increased 153 percent. By the way, Dr. Sammarco and her medical team are doing an excellent job in very difficult circumstances. They are on top of this epidemic, but they need our help. These synthetic drugs are incredibly powerful. Heroin is already extremely addictive, as I said, and typically much cheaper, stronger, and more widely available than these prescription painkillers we talked about. Fentanyl can be 50, sometimes even 100, times as powerful as heroin. Think about that. Carfentanil is sometimes 10,000 times as powerful as morphine. So, as you can see, as these synthetic drugs are coming into our communities, they are more dangerous, they are stronger, they are more addictive. Carfentanil is so powerful, it is primarily used as a tranquilizer for large animals such as elephants. It is so powerful that in cases where the police who have responded to an overdose have overdosed from just breathing fentanyl in the air or getting it on their skin at the scene. It is so powerful that sometimes multiple doses of Narcan are required to reverse an overdose. Narcan is this miracle drug that our first responders increasingly are carrying, and thank God it is there because it reverses the effects of the overdose, but Narcan is meant for a heroin overdose. Sometimes with these synthetic drugs like fentanyl and carfentanil and U-4, you need several doses of Narcan to reverse the overdose, and sometimes it does not work. I have heard cases where seven doses of Narcan were necessary to save someone's life. These synthetic drugs are taking a heavy toll on our country and my State of Ohio. In particular, in my hometown in Ohio recently--Cincinnati, OH--in just one 6-day span in August it had 174 overdoses: 6 days, 174 overdoses in one city. That is less than 1 week in one city: 174. It is unprecedented, at least in our State. Dr. Sammarco has confirmed this sudden spike in overdoses is the result of heroin being laced with other drugs. At least in many of these cases it is carfentanil. So somebody is actually putting this large-animal tranquilizer into the heroin, mixing it, resulting in this huge spike in overdoses. I was glad to be helpful in providing a sample of carfentanil for Coroner Sammarco, because she could not find it anywhere in the region easily. Once she found it, we were able to get the comparison of the sample to what had happened and be able to confirm that carfentanil was behind these huge increases in overdoses. Our first responders deserve our praise because they were able to save the vast majority of these lives. So over 170 people overdosing, and yet, sadly, tragically, although there were four or five people who died, the rest of these people, over 170 people were saved. That is amazing. It is because they responded quickly. They responded professionally. Last Wednesday I went to Fire Station 24 in Cincinnati, OH, which handled the largest number of these overdoses--1 fire station, 34 overdoses in 6 days. They talked to me about how they saved lives. I thanked them, of course, for what they are doing every day. One thing they said to me was: Senator, this is not the answer. Saving people by using Narcan is necessary, it is absolutely necessary, but they said it is not the answer. I agree with them. The answer is getting people into treatment, getting them back on track, getting them into longer term recovery rather than applying Narcan again and again, as they tell me, sometimes to the same person. By the way, this epidemic is taking a toll on our firefighters and other first responders--police officers also. As we said, it has made their jobs more dangerous. It is also taking more of their time and resources. Last year the number we have is that firefighters and other first responders applied Narcan 16,000 times in one State. This year it will be far higher than that. By the way, this is why CARA provides training for Narcan, the legislation we talked about earlier, the Comprehensive Addiction and Recovery Act. It also provides more resources to our first responders to purchase Narcan. Narcan is getting more expensive, in part, because there is an increased demand. We have to be sure there are not any other reasons that those expenses are going up, and we have to be sure to provide the resources to our first responders so they can have these lifesaving drugs on hand. By the way, firefighters all over Ohio tell me the same thing, and I have talked to a number of them. I have gone to other firehouses, and I ask the same question everywhere I go: Are you going on more fire runs or more overdose runs? The answer now--consistently, everywhere I go-- is overdoses. There are more overdoses than fire runs in every firehouse I have been to in Ohio. The scenes they encounter when they go on these runs are truly heartbreaking. They see families torn apart. During that unprecedented 6-day period in Cincinnati, they saved the lives of two parents who had overdosed in front of their two teenage sons. Last week in West Chester Township, OH, outside of Cincinnati, police saved the lives of a father and son who together overdosed on heroin while the father was driving on Interstate I-75. Thank God no one else was injured or killed. A few days later, in Forest Park, OH, outside of Cincinnati, a 3- year-old girl found her grandmother, who was babysitting her, unconscious from an overdose. When police arrived with Narcan to save her grandmother's life, the story from the police officer was the little girl asked one of the police officers to please hold her while her grandmother was unconscious on the floor. It is heartbreaking. Forest Park police responded to five other overdoses that same day, including another overdose in the same apartment complex. This is a small town with a population of about 19,000 people. Two weeks ago, the Akron Beacon Journal published a letter from a high school girl from Akron to her dad, who was addicted to heroin. She writes to her dad, in part: When I found out you got arrested, I was happy. . . . I was going to finally be able to sleep at night without having to worry about whether I was going to get a call the next day telling me that [heroin] had finally taken you away. I know that being in prison isn't the best life, but at least you are alive. . . . This is what heroin does: it possesses its victim and does not let go until he is dead. To that high school girl, what we hope is that her father goes through a drug court, can get into treatment, can get into longer term recovery, reunite with his family, and get back to his life. We know that many of the drugs that are causing so many of these overdoses in Ohio--the fentanyl, the Carfentanil, the U-4--don't come from Ohio. In fact, they don't come from any State in this body; they come from other countries. Incidentally, it doesn't mean that someday they couldn't come from this country, but right now they are coming from other countries. From all the information we have from law enforcement, we believe the vast majority of these synthetic drugs are being made in laboratories in China and in India and then shipped through the mail to our communities to meet this growing demand for drugs. The traffickers actually get this poison, this synthetic drug, through the U.S. mail system. Right now, it is difficult to detect these packages coming from overseas before it is way too late. Unlike private carriers such as UPS, FedEx, or others, the Postal Service does not require electronic Customs data for packages coming into the country, so we don't know what is coming in. This makes dangerous packages containing drugs such as fentanyl or Carfentanil or U-4 that much harder to stop. We have had hearings on this issue in the Senate. In June, the Judiciary Committee held a hearing on synthetic drugs. A witness testified that because of this loophole of the Postal Service not requiring the information but the private carriers requiring it, getting these drugs into our communities was easier and that the drug traffickers used the mail system. To me, it is a loophole. The Homeland Security Committee on which I sit has also held hearings and a roundtable discussion on the flow of fentanyl and other synthetic forms of heroin into this country. We learned the same thing--that there is this discrepancy between how the mail system handles it and how private carriers handle it. Today I have introduced legislation to address the threat of synthetic drugs by simply closing that loophole, simply saying that with regard to packages coming from overseas, the Postal Service should require advanced electronic data so we know what is in these packages. This would include information such as who and where it is coming from, where it is going, and what is in it. As Customs and Border Patrol--the border protection people--has told us, this information will provide a much better tool to law enforcement to help them ensure that these dangerous drugs won't end up in the hands of drug traffickers who then sell these dangerous drugs in our communities. It will make our streets safer and save lives by helping to prevent overdoses. I think it is a commonsense idea that builds on CARA, the Comprehensive Addiction and Recovery Act, because while CARA addresses the demand for drugs through prevention, education, treatment, and recovery, this legislation will help to cut the supply of drugs, help to cut off the flow of this poison into our communities. I think these two ideas go hand in hand. If you are one of the 92 Senators in this body, out of 100, who voted for CARA, I hope you will support this legislation too. Our law enforcement and first responders are doing an amazing job. They are saving lives every single day, and they are to be commended, but they need some help. They deserve our best efforts to stop these dangerous drugs from entering into the country in the first place, and so do the hundreds of thousands of families in Ohio and around the country who have been affected by this epidemic of addiction. They deserve our help as well. They deserve a safer community. They deserve peace of mind. They deserve to know that we are doing all we can to try to keep these dangerous synthetic drugs out of our communities. Just as I did with the CARA legislation, I urge my colleagues on both sides of the aisle to support this additional legislation. Frankly, 3\1/2\ years ago when we started putting together the CARA legislation, if this synthetic drug issue had been at the level it is today, I believe it would have been included in the CARA legislation. But we are now seeing this epidemic growing--heroin and prescription drugs, yes, but increasingly synthetic drugs, as we talked about this evening. It is time for us to be sure we are doing all we can to keep this poison out of our communities.

Mr. PORTMAN

Mr. PORTMAN. Mr. President, I rise to talk about the Comprehensive Addiction and Recovery Act. We had a good vote earlier today on proceeding to that legislation, and it is my expectation and hope that we will vote on this legislation either today or tomorrow morning. Let me say first say, this legislation called CARA, the Comprehensive Addiction and Recovery Act, also includes some criminal justice reform. It is one step closer to this broader bill that Senator Grassley and Senator Booker just talked about. I am a cosponsor of their bill because I do think we need sentencing reform, but CARA actually has some reforms called diversion programs. Instead of putting people who are in the criminal justice system and addicted to drugs in prison, they are put into a treatment program, and those treatment programs have proven to be successful. We have drug court funding and specific new programs for our veterans. The notion is, this is part of criminal justice reform, to actually take people who are suffering from drug addiction in the criminal justice system and move them into treatment, which makes so much more sense for them, their families, taxpayers, their communities. That is part of this underlying legislation that we will vote on later today in the Comprehensive Addiction and Recovery Act. I also support broader legislation. I am hoping the broader legislation will have more to do with the prisoner reentry programs as well--the so-called second chance. I am the author of the Second Chance Act from my House days, and I hope that legislation can be reauthorized as part of this larger criminal justice reform issue. Today I will focus on the Comprehensive Addiction and Recovery Act because this legislation is badly needed. It is an emergency in our communities right now. This is the heroin and prescription drug issue that unfortunately many more people are learning about because it is affecting many more of us. I had a tele-townhall meeting last night, which I do monthly. We had 25,000 Ohioans on the call. We typically have a few polls where we ask about the top issues. Last night, we asked how many people on the call were directly affected by the heroin and prescription drug issue. We asked people to indicate that by hitting ``1'' for a yes and ``2'' for a no. Sixty-eight percent of the people on this call said: Yes, they were directly affected. We had a lot of calls from people who were affected. We had a call from a woman whose stepson was addicted and he was trying to get treatment but couldn't find a place, and they wanted me to help them find a proper place to get treatment and recovery services. Others called in about the legislation and asked why we haven't passed it yet. My answer to them was, it is coming and help is on the way. I am frustrated, just as they are, that we haven't moved more quickly on this, but, again, we finally had a vote today to move this legislation forward. I hope the final passage vote will occur later today or tomorrow morning, and we will be able to get this to the President's desk for his signature. It initially passed the Senate with a 94-to-1 vote back on March 10. It then went over to the House of Representatives, where the House worked through their own process. They had 18 separate bills rather than 1 comprehensive bill, and then in the period between then and now, we have had this conference between the House and Senate to work out the differences. That conference report was voted on in the House last Friday, and it was an overwhelming vote. Why? Because this makes so much sense. Again, on the Senate floor today we had a very strong vote result of 90 to 2 on the cloture motion to move this legislation forward, and I am hopeful we will have a strong vote tomorrow morning so we can send this to the President and get it to our communities and begin to get those who need it some help. The legislation is considered by some to be inadequate because it doesn't have enough funding in it. Well, it is not a funding bill. It is not an appropriations bill. It is a bill that establishes new programs to fund new and better ways to deal with addiction. It authorizes significant new spending. Since the Senate passed the bill with a 94-to-1 vote, only two things have happened with regard to funding. One is that we more than doubled the authorization so there is more funding authorized--$181 million per year. Second, we also had the Appropriations Committee go through its process and both the Senate and House Appropriations Committee voted to actively increase funding in this area, and that is a good thing. I think it is an emergency, I think it is urgent, and I think we should spend more money here because it will save money over the long haul and because there are so many people who are not achieving their God-given purpose because this addiction has taken them off track. We have to help them and help them now. We have to help keep people from getting into that funnel of addiction by focusing more on prevention and education, but all that has happened since the 94-to-1 vote in the Senate is that there has been a 93-percent increase over last year's funding which will go into effect next year, and by the way that is a 539-percent increase over the funding just 2 years ago. The House appropriations bill has a bigger increase in the funding. I will fight for that funding, and I will fight to ensure that that funding actually applies to the programs that are in the Comprehensive Addiction and Recovery Act because it is the kind of legislation that will actually make a difference helping to ensure that we can begin to turn the tide on this issue. The legislation before us is one that 94 Senators have already voted for, and, again, it passed the House with big numbers so I am hopeful there will not be any roadblocks in the way of getting it done. Today I was asked by some people: What does the bill really do? I started to go through all of the specific grant programs for our veterans, mothers who are pregnant, kids who are born dependent on drugs, and those folks who find themselves unable to get treatment. There are specific provisions for our law enforcement personnel, which is why the Fraternal Order of Police has been a strong supporter. I appreciate them for standing up early as a law enforcement entity. Others have backed this legislation as well because it provides more training on how to use this miracle drug called Narcan, or naloxone, which will help save people who have overdosed. There are a lot of specific programs here, but I think the answer to the question as to what it does is pretty simple. For the first time ever in this United States Congress, it begins to treat addiction like the disease it is, and this means, by necessity, if it is a disease, we need to get people into treatment. It begins to change the way we approach addiction by saying: Let's remove the stigma so people will come forward and families are willing to talk about it. Last night on that call, when 68 percent of the respondents to the poll said they were directly affected by this issue, I bet many of those people had not thought about talking about that issue publicly. I think this legislation helps to establish the fact that this is a disease. This legislation will also help deal with an underlying problem, which is how we will deal with prescription drugs in our communities. Too often in our society there has been an overprescribing of painkillers that are addictive. I heard another story today, and I hear them every day when I am back home. This was somebody whose family member had gone to the hospital for a knee operation, and when he was done with the procedure, the doctor gave him 80 Percocets. He didn't take any of them because he didn't need them, but his point was: Why 80 pills? Four out of five of the heroin addicts in Ohio and around this country started with prescription drugs, and often it was very inadvertent. It was something where someone had a wisdom tooth taken out and was given a number of these prescription pain pills but didn't understand the risks. When that person started taking them, there was a physiological change in that person's brain. That person became addicted and that person went to heroin and that person then died of an overdose. That has happened to two families in my home State. Those parents have now come forward not to just tell that story and share their grief but to channel that grief into something positive, which is to let other parents know. That is in this legislation. We have a national awareness program to let people know about the fact that the prescription drug link to heroin, opioids, and addiction is real, and we must be very careful. For the first time ever in Federal law, it also promotes recovery. Treatment is one thing, but as one of my friends back home who is in recovery told me, getting clean is easier, but staying clean is hard. In other words, so often what we found as we did our research around the country is that people go through a treatment program, but the recovery services aren't there to take them through that longer term support to enable them to stay clean. Tragically, we save a life only to see someone overdose again later. Recovery is about finishing the job and helping people get their lives back, and it is an incredibly important part of this legislation. Earlier this week, I spoke to Faces & Voices of Recovery. They have been terrific in promoting this legislation, and just as important, letting people who are in recovery know that you have friends, that this can be addressed, and that you can come out on the other side as a person who is achieving their purpose in life and God-given abilities. You can get through this. I was honored to speak at their rally here in Washington, DC. This was about a year ago, and they brought in people from all over the country. They had some great entertainers and people who were willing to stand up for the first time and say: I am in recovery. If you are in recovery, too, we want to embrace and help you. One of the advocates whom I met with the other night is a woman named Sarah Nerad. Sarah is someone I have gotten to know over the years. A couple of years ago, we had a roundtable discussion as this legislation was being drafted, and Sarah told me her story. She was a recovering addict who went to Ohio State University. She found there were no support services at the university. She started a student recovery support community. That community at Ohio State University not only has a lot of people now joining and participating in it--recovering addicts, family members, and friends--but she is also now spreading this at colleges and universities around the country. There are grants in this legislation to promote these support communities because they work, and I hold up Sarah as an example of someone who was brave and courageous enough to talk about her addiction and therefore was able to get other people attracted to her and her support group. As a result, she was able to go on and help so many other people and change so many other lives, and really, in her case, to be able to say that she is a major part of this legislation, because we included this partly because of her testimony and her stories. Until we end this stigma, we are not going to make the progress that we must. The Drug Enforcement Agency tells us that this is not getting better, this is getting worse. They tell us that from 2010 until the most recent data we have, which is 2014, there has been a tripling of heroin overdoses. In my own State of Ohio, we have seen a dramatic increase. Since March 10, when 94 Senators voted for CARA, we have lost more than 14,000 Americans. Think about that. Since March 10, more than 14,000 Americans have succumbed. In other words, they have overdosed and died from heroin and prescription drugs, opioid overdoses. Unfortunately, this is just the tip of the iceberg. As horrible as those numbers are--the 14,000 overdose deaths--think of all the casualties. Think of the 16,000 people in Ohio who have been saved from overdoses by Narcan. But many of them have not gotten into treatment, have not gone into recovery, and they continue to be broken apart from their families. The drugs are everything--not their kids, not their parents. They continue to be unable or unwilling to work. They continue to commit crimes. In most communities in my home State of Ohio, law enforcement will tell us that the No. 1 cause of crime is this issue. They continue to be unable to pursue their God-given abilities. Those are the casualties of this. No one suffers alone. In Ohio, we are told that 200,000 people are now struggling with addiction. That is the size of a major city in Ohio. Many of those addicted are parents. We are told that 30 percent-- think about this--30 percent of all kids in Ohio who are in the custody of the State are there because their parents are opioid users. Among infants, that number is 70 percent. Seventy percent of the infants who are in the custody of the State of Ohio are there because their parents are opioid users. I call that an epidemic. It is driving up crime, as I said. In Marion, OH, Police Chief Bill Collins put it this way: ``All of the property crimes we have--the shoplifting, the theft, the robberies--all go back to one thing, and that's heroin.'' That is a quote from him. He says that this epidemic makes him and other law enforcement officials feel like they are ``in the ocean without a life jacket.'' That is what we are trying to do with CARA, is to provide that life jacket. It is not just the silver bullet. It won't solve all the problems. Washington is not going to solve this problem--it is going to be solved in our communities and in our hearts--but this will help. It will help make the Federal Government a much better partner with State and local government, with the wonderful nonprofits that are doing the good work, and with the families and the communities. Last week, in just one 36-hour period in Akron, OH, 20 people overdosed on opioids, 3 of them fatally. That is not even 2 days in one city. When the first responders arrived at one of the overdoses, by the way, there were two small children present. In Central Ohio, in Columbus, nine people overdosed, two of them fatally, on Sunday. That is in one city in 1 day. Two of those occurred at McDonald's, by the way, with families around. It was in broad daylight. A few months ago, we lost seven-time Grammy Award winner Prince to a fentanyl overdose. We all know about Prince. You might not know that this week, 10-time Grammy Award-winning singer Chaka Khan checked into a rehabilitation center for fentanyl addiction. I want to commend her for having the courage to admit she needed help and for taking the steps--very publicly--necessary to get her life back on track. This will help others to do the same thing. God bless you for doing it. I think this is, sadly, an instructive case because, much like Prince, she has fame, she has fortune, 10 No. 1 hit songs, and all of the talent you could ever ask for. Most people would say those aren't the kinds of people who get addicted. Addiction knows no ZIP Code. Addiction spares no one. It affects people of every single background. If you talk to people in Ohio, they get it. Ohioans understand the scope of this epidemic now, and they are taking action. They expect us to help and to take action too. That is what this legislation is about. They couldn't believe how slow we have moved on this. They couldn't believe these ideas that we might try to delay this further for reasons that had nothing to do with the substance. The Talawanda School District outside of my hometown of Cincinnati, OH, announced last week that they are now adding to their health and wellness curriculum key information about opiates. I talked to a couple of superintendents today who are doing the same thing in their schools. I believe this is critical to preventing overdoses from beginning in the first place, by using better prevention and identification, keeping people from getting into that funnel of addiction, and that is what is happening. CARA supports this. In Trumbull County, OH, more than 200 Ohioans participated in a Walk Against Heroin over the Fourth of July weekend. Again, people are starting to take action. I know it can be very discouraging. The scope of this problem is overwhelming, but there is hope. Treatment can work. Recovery does work. If we can get this legislation to the President, I am confident he will sign it into law, and in many more of our communities we will have better treatment and better recovery and more hope for the people we represent. I thank Senator Sheldon Whitehouse for his work with me on this issue. He has been the coauthor of this. We started more than 3 years ago, going to conferences here in Washington, DC. We had five conferences. We brought in experts from all over the country--people whom I have talked about earlier included--from Ohio but every State. We talked about how to actually make a difference in communities around the country. We didn't care where the idea came from--Republican, Democrat, Independent. That didn't matter. What mattered was whether the idea made sense. Senator Whitehouse and his staff have done a terrific job in keeping this bill moving and making sure we didn't get off track. I also thank other colleagues who have been helpful, especially Senator Kelly Ayotte and Senator Amy Klobuchar for their passion and for their help in crafting this legislation. The American people are tired of the partisanship. We all hear that. We all know that. It is time for us to act. I also thank some of the staff who have been so helpful on this legislation and who have put their heart and soul into this effort, including Megan Harrington, Pam Thiessen, Mark Isakowitz, Teri Geiger, Brian Riedl, Allen Ernst, and Sarah Schmidt on my staff. I am proud of their work throughout this process. I thank all the advocates we have worked with all across Ohio and all across the country. They have been here in Washington. They helped us to get the great vote in the House last week, and they are working today on the vote tonight or tomorrow. I want to point out in particular that Jessica Nickel has helped to keep us all moving in the same direction. The outside advocates have been terrific. Last, I thank those who have shared their stories, and most importantly, I thank them for their willingness to allow us to hear from them. These are people who are in recovery. These are people who are in the trenches, dealing every day with this issue, who are providing the love and the attention and the support to help people get their treatment and into recovery. These are our first responders who are out there on the frontlines dealing with this issue every single day. These are our doctors and nurses who find our waiting rooms and our emergency rooms are filled with people who have addiction problems and overdoses. These are the people who work in the neonatal units with these babies who are born dependent, a 750-percent increase in my home State just in the last 12 years, and they take these babies through a recovery and treatment program so that they can be healthy and get back on track. I thank all of them. I want to finish with a story. About a year ago I visited a treatment center in Ohio. I have been to more than a dozen treatment centers in my home State to talk about this issue and to get ideas. It was the Zeph Center, which is a center in Toledo, OH. I had asked if we could have a discussion, a roundtable discussion, and sure enough, we did. At this roundtable discussion, some people came forward who are in recovery. There were about a dozen people there. Again, I congratulate them for coming forward and for being willing to talk to me and to be public. There were people there from the community who heard their stories for the first time, and they did share their stories, but also they came ready to talk. They had reviewed the draft legislation. They had it in front of them. They had ideas. They had input. They had looked at every single section of the bill. They knew what programs were funded. They talked about what they thought worked and what didn't work in their lives. It was an example of the process we went through with this legislation. It wasn't just a bunch of people in Washington saying we know what is best; it was people back home saying: We need this help, and we want to be sure you do it right. And by the way, keep it nonpartisan. Make sure we get this done. Don't let anything get in the way. That is what we have done. That is what we will do tonight or tomorrow morning when we vote on this bill. That is why it is so important that we get it passed, because it is those recovering addicts at the Zeph Center and others around the State of Ohio who have patiently waited for this legislation. It is now our duty to deliver that legislation and help turn the tide in this epidemic. Thank you, Mr. President. I yield the floor.

Mr. PORTMAN

Mr. PORTMAN. Mr. President, I thank my colleague and, in less than a minute, I want to acknowledge something historic that just happened on this floor--a 90-to-2 vote for the Comprehensive Addiction and Recovery Act. This is the Senate agreeing with the House to do something important to address this epidemic of heroin and prescription drug abuse, and I congratulate my colleague Sheldon Whitehouse, my coauthor, and encourage all my colleagues to now get this signed as soon as possible so we can get it out to our communities to help. I thank the Chair.

Mr. PORTMAN

Mr. PORTMAN. Madam President, I ask unanimous consent that the order for the quorum call be rescinded.

Mr. PORTMAN. Madam President, I rise again to talk about the heroin and prescription drug epidemic that has gripped our country and has affected every single State represented in this body. Sadly, it is a problem that is getting worse, not better. I say that having been in Dayton, OH, where sadly we had 15 people overdose in the space of the Fourth of July weekend in one that city in Ohio. This is happening all over our country, and it is an issue we have to address. The Federal Government has an important role to play. There is much more we can do. This body recognizes that. Back on March 10, the Senate passed something called the Comprehensive Addiction and Recovery Act-- CARA. CARA was on this floor for 2\1/2\ weeks, and there was some back and forth about the legislation, but by the end of the process--I think partly because Members were going home and hearing from their constituents about it--94 Senators in this body voted yes on it. One voted no, and it passed 94 to 1. Those kinds of votes almost never happen around here. It happened because people realize this is a crisis that we do need to address, and the bill that we came up with actually made sense because it was based on the best practices from around the country. So I have come to the floor every single week we have been in session since March 10 to talk about this issue, to urge my House colleagues to act, which they did, and over the past several weeks to urge that the House and Senate versions be brought together. That happened yesterday. Finally, from March 10 until now, going back and forth, we have what is called a conference committee report, meaning the House and Senate versions have been reconciled. There were compromises made and changes made, and we have one bill to go back to both the House and Senate for a vote and to the President for his signature and, most importantly, to get to our communities to begin to provide more help on prevention and education, recovery, treatment, helping law enforcement, and stopping overprescribing of drugs. It is a comprehensive approach to have the Federal Government be a better partner with State and local governments and nonprofits to be able to address this issue that unfortunately millions of families in America are now facing. I want to thank the Members of the conference committee. On the Senate side that would be Senators Grassley, Alexander, Hatch, Sessions, Leahy, Murray, and Wyden. I also want to thank all the House conferees. They did some good work. Each one of these Members I just mentioned has a real passion for this issue. They care about this issue. I want to thank my coauthor, Senator Sheldon Whitehouse of Rhode Island, because he did a pretty good job of talking to the conferees on his side of the aisle, as some of us did, including me, talking to conferees on our side of the aisle. Senator Whitehouse and I started this process 3 years ago. We had five conferences here in Washington, DC. We brought in experts from all around the country. So we had a real interest in getting this done, and I commend him and congratulate him for this result as well. I know that those who are in the advocate community--in other words, people who work in this field every day in prevention and treatment, law enforcement folks, and health care folks--are also very happy that this conference report has come together. Senator Whitehouse and I are very happy that the conference report kept to the substance of the Senate bill and frankly added some good elements that came out of the House legislative process. They had 18 separate bills, we had one comprehensive bill, and we had to bring them all together. There are now more than 230 groups from all around the country. A lot of them are national groups, and some are State groups that have come out in support of this conference report--in other words, supporting the final CARA product. Yesterday I met with about two dozen of these groups to talk about the process and how we got to where we are, to talk about the need to act quickly to get this into law because they are desperate. If you are a professional in the area of treatment and recovery, you want this help. You wanted it yesterday. We need it now. By the way, these are people we consulted with during these 3 years. They all came and participated in these five conferences. We also consulted with many others, including the Obama administration. They testified at these conferences. They also testified at the hearing we had at the Judiciary Committee. They were supportive of CARA in part because we took their input. We took everybody's good ideas, not Republican ideas and Democrat ideas but good ideas. We kept this not just bipartisan but nonpartisan. It would be nice if we keep it that way. I understand this is an election year and that some people may want to score a few political points. But having gone through this process in a nonpartisan way, having gotten this great vote out of the Senate and a strong vote in the House, and now having this conference report that has the right mix of good House and Senate substantive policies, I would hope to be able to make a difference in the fight. I would hope that we would not hear any more talk threatening to block this conference report at the last minute. Some of the concerns people are bringing up in the last minute are concerns that were never raised on the Senate floor. Some conferees did not sign the conference report because they said they wanted the mandatory spending that is in the President's budget be a part of the bill. That was never raised on the Senate floor. It was never raised even as an amendment in the appropriations process. It just took place over the past several weeks. So this is new. It doesn't mean we shouldn't have more spending. In fact, as some of you know, we had a vote on the floor on more spending. It was about emergency spending--not mandatory spending, which happens to be offset with cuts and other entitlement programs or tax increases, but emergency spending. I believe emergency spending is appropriate because I believe this is an emergency, and I voted for that emergency spending, but many of my colleagues did not. It did not pass. On the mandatory spending side, again, it is interesting because that was never brought up before. I for one would be for more spending, but I certainly wouldn't want to block the new spending that we have in CARA, which is a substantial increase in spending, because I am concerned about having more spending. Every day we are losing about 129 Americans. This is why there is a group out there called the CARA family coalition that came to Washington recently. There were 129 families representing that one family who every day loses somebody to heroin and prescription drug addiction through overdoses. Those families are waiting. Some of them are here this week because they are interested in seeing what happens. More Americans are now dying from drug overdoses than car accidents. It is the No. 1 cause of accidental death. In Akron, OH, 2 days ago, over a 10-hour span--this is one city, Akron, OH, 2 days ago--15 people overdosed on heroin. Two more people overdosed later the same day. It included a woman and her two daughters, all of whom were found unconscious. It included a 44-year-old man who died of an overdose. There have been 55 people just in Akron, OH, who have died from heroin overdoses this year. This means they will set a tragic record this year in terms of overdose deaths. The problem is getting worse, not better. On Tuesday in Dayton, OH, I met with law enforcement and treatment service providers. We announced a new program called the Front Door Initiative. Sheriff Phil Plummer was there. He told me that in one weekend in one town--again, in Dayton, OH--15 people died of overdoses. No one is immune from this. We have lost moms and dads, college students, grandmothers, celebrities, rich, poor, and people of every background to this epidemic. It knows no ZIP Code. It is in the inner city, it is in the suburbs, and it is in the rural areas. In the 117 days that have passed since the Senate passed CARA on March 10, approximately 14,000 Americans have died of overdoses from prescription drugs and from heroin--14,000 Americans. It is time to act. Again, the good news is, we had a meeting yesterday of this conference committee between the House and Senate to finally pass this legislation, then to the House and Senate for a final vote, then getting it to the President, and most importantly out to our communities. By the way, the 14,000 is not the whole story, as tragic as that is, because of course there are millions of other casualties--fellow Americans who may have lost a job or their entire career, have broken relationships with their families and friends--and I hear this all the time back home in Ohio. I heard it over the weekend, when someone came up to me at a parade and said: I am one of those people who cares about this issue. Thank you for fighting on it. We have had this issue in my family, and it broke our family apart. People say the drugs become everything. We don't have time for partisan games. This is urgent. I think it is more urgent than any issue we are dealing with. Nine out of ten of those who are struggling with addiction are not getting the treatment they need. I think if this were the case of any other disease, it would be viewed as a national scandal. It is wrong and it is unacceptable. Addiction is a disease. One of the tenets of this whole legislation is to acknowledge that. With all of the specific improvements we have in terms of grants going out--for treatment, recovery, prevention education, helping police with Narcan, and so on--in a sense, the biggest thing for this legislation is to say: Let's get this stigma out of the way. Let's deal with this as a disease and get people into the treatment they need to get back on their feet. Again, a few months ago, I, along with others, worked with the Senate Appropriations Committee to be sure we did have additional funding to fully fund CARA, of course, and to get more funding into the pipeline for treatment, recovery, education, and prevention. When people talk about the funding issue, let me just be clear, we are increasing funding. Of course, the CARA bill itself increases funding in the authorization, but here is what the Appropriations Committees have done. The 2015 number was $41 million. This is for the Department of Health and Human Services, discretionary spending for heroin and opioid abuse. It went up to $136 million for this year, the year we are in now. That is a 237-percent increase. Next year, for 2017--when and if we can get CARA passed this week or next week, this is what would apply--we are seeing a 93-percent increase from the 237-percent increase. That is more funding. I wasn't great at math in school, but that is more funding. In fact, it is a 539-percent increase from 2015. For those who say we are not taking this seriously enough on the funding side--of course, I would like to do more, but we have to acknowledge that a lot has been done. In terms of the overall spending, not just the HHS spending, we have also seen increases. This would include Department of Justice and other grantmaking. We have seen an increase from 41 to 136 to 262 in the Senate appropriations. I am sorry. This is to add to the House version of the appropriations for 2017. For next year, again in the Senate, we have a big increase that will start on October 1, if we are able to pass our appropriations bills--whether it is a CR or an omnibus or whatever form it takes--this is what the increase would be, at a minimum, I would hope, because that is what passed out of the Senate Appropriations Committee. This week, this is what the House reported passing. So as big as this increase is in the Senate--again, a 93-percent increase from this year's increase--it looks like, from what we have seen from reports from the House Appropriations Committees and in conversations with them, they are talking about a 393-percent increase in 1 year. Again, this is the House Appropriations Committee--a 1,500-percent increase over, again, 2015. For those who say there is not new spending being dedicated to this, of course there is. That is good. With regard to the total discretionary spending, this is not just HHS but all the different areas, including the Department of Justice and so on, which has also seen an increase. This is the Senate only. We don't have the House number yet, but for the Senate, we have gone from 220 to 320 to 470, a 113-percent increase over last year's spending. We are seeing more spending, and that is good. By the way, this spending is connected to the CARA legislation. This increase was increased with the provisions that were in the CARA legislation to be sure that the two matched up. Finally, this is the increase we got in the conference committee for the amount that is authorized--not the actual spending but the amount that the Senate and the House would authorize for increased spending for new programs in CARA. Again, the Senate-passed bill, 94 to 1, had a $78 million-per-year increase. The conference report more than doubled that to $181 million. This is what is interesting to me. There are Senators on this floor who voted for CARA because it was the right thing to do--a nonpartisan exercise with a lot of bipartisan support, a 94-to-1 vote. All that has changed since then is we have it more than doubling the authorized amount of spending in CARA. With regard to the appropriations process--because we didn't have this appropriations in place then, the Senate committee had not acted, the subcommittee had not acted--in those 117 days since CARA was passed, we now see a 46- percent increase overall in the discretionary spending. With regard to HHS, which is where most of the treatment money is, we see a 93-percent increase. For the House version, it looks to be an over 393-percent increase. All that has changed since CARA has passed with a 94-to-1 vote were these big increases in spending. Again, I voted for emergency spending on the floor. I think it is an emergency. I would go further, but for those who say they now cannot support this good legislation because of spending, it makes no sense. There is no way to argue that. There must be some other reason. I hope it is not politics. Again, that is what people hate about Washington. If partisanship is going to slip into this at the end of the process and keep people from getting the help they need and save lives, that would be a tragedy. These new spending programs will help, but we also have to point out that CARA is not just about spending, it is about authorizing better programs. There are lots of examples of that where we have done that in this body in other areas. I am the author of the Drug-Free Communities Act. It authorized spending to create anti-drug coalitions around the country. It has helped spawn the creation of 2000 coalitions. I founded one in my hometown of Cincinnati over 20 years ago. Another 2000 have benefited from that. That legislation did not have an appropriation--because it was an authorization, as CARA is--but it set up new programs, as CARA does. That program to date, the Drug-Free Communities Act, has spent $1.35 billion focused on prevention and education on drugs. We have more prevention and education programs that I think are even an improvement in the CARA legislation, but that is an example of what an authorization bill does. In 2013, the Senate voted to reauthorize a bill called the Violence Against Women Act. I voted for it. Every single Democratic Member of Congress voted for it. It passed the Senate on a bipartisan basis, 78 to 22. The bill increased authorizations to $655 million annually and made policy changes, but it did not--and I repeat it did not--include the spending in the bill. It was an authorization bill. The spending bills come with the appropriations process. It didn't have mandatory spending. It didn't have immediate appropriations. It was an authorization bill. It was an incredibly important issue, violence against women--a priority. Yet we didn't see some of these same concerns raised. Nobody voted against the Violence Against Women Act because it didn't have appropriations attached to it. That just wouldn't have made sense, as it would not for any other authorization we pass around here. I know that wasn't an election year, but we voted for it. Then we fought for the funding as part of the appropriations process. We were successful in doing that, just as we will be successful in fighting for these appropriations, as we did this year, getting a big increase, a 237-percent increase, and as we will next year--as we see already. Thanks to our advocacy, those of us who were focused on the issue, we are getting the increases to cover these changes in CARA. Of course, all the funding in the world isn't going to make a dent in this issue if it is not spent the right way, and that is why you have the authorization bills like CARA because we actually say, not just for the new spending but even for the existing spending, let's spend it in a way that is evidence based, where we actually look at what is working and what is not working in treatment and in recovery. The number of people who relapse is shockingly high. The success rate is not what any of us would like it to be. Part of that is because some treatment and recovery programs work better than others. We want to be darn sure the tax dollars we are putting against this are being responsibly spent because we are good stewards of the taxpayers' dollars and because this crisis needs to be addressed. Again, this legislation is not just about more money, although it does authorize more money and that is good. It is also about changing the way we spend the money so it goes to evidence-based prevention, treatment, and recovery programs that have been proven to work. That is why we cannot let a debate about funding jeopardize the critical policy changes that CARA would make and because CARA would help ensure that these new resources would be spent on what we know works. That is what this 3-year process was about. That is what the conferences were about. That is what all the experts coming to Washington to tell us what works in the States was about--getting those best practices into this legislation. Again, the CARA legislation improves prevention by sponsoring a national awareness campaign about the dangers of abusing prescription opioids. Probably four out of five heroin addicts who overdose today started on prescription drug. That information needs to get out there. We need to explain this connection to people if we are going to get at this issue. The legislation also targets anti-drug coalitions in areas where the epidemic is worse. So where it is at its worst, there is more funding targeted to these anti-drug coalitions to focus on prevention and education. That is key to keep people out of the funnel of addiction, the grip of addiction. We should all be for that. That is in this legislation. It would increase access to treatment by increasing the availability of naloxone, which is a miracle drug. It can actually reverse an overdose while it is happening. It will train our first responders to be able to use Narcan or naloxone more effectively. These provisions will save lives, particularly when it is connected--when saving a life is connected to getting somebody into treatment. The conference agreement would also improve recovery for those who have been treated for addiction. It will build recovery communities like the ones at colleges and universities--perhaps at the State of the Presiding Officer. We have one we are very proud of at Ohio State University. These recovery communities will give the peer support that is necessary to follow through on addiction treatment over the long term. We know that works. That is one of the keys, not just the treatment but the longer term recovery to keep people heading in the right direction. I think people in your State, people in Ohio, certainly understand the urgency of this problem because everywhere I go, whether it is in the cities, the suburbs, or the rural areas, people ask me about it. And they ask me why we aren't doing more, why we are not acting on this. Two weeks ago in Southwest Ohio, in my hometown of Cincinnati, a 28- year-old was arrested after a young man in the Cincinnati area who bought heroin from him was found dead of an overdose. A 17-year-old teenager was found dead of an overdose. That is what is happening on our streets today. A few days ago, a man from Canton, OH, was pulled over in Akron, in Northeast Ohio, for speeding. He had 13 pounds of heroin on him. By one measure, that is about $400,000 of heroin--enough for 20,000 injections. If not for that apprehension, we would have had a lot more distribution of heroin and overdoses and potentially lives lost. In Madison County, in Central Ohio, police arrested 16 people for trafficking heroin. At one of the drug houses they went to, there was a 5-year-old child. That is what is happening. According to the sheriff's office, a high percentage of property crimes in that county are directly tied to opioid addiction. Sheriff James Sabin says that out of all the problems facing law enforcement in Central Ohio, heroin is the No. 1 issue we are dealing with. That is what is happening. Ohioans know this is happening to their friends, their neighbors, and their family members. They understand the urgency of this crisis. That is why all over the Buckeye State people are taking action at the local level and at the State level. But they want the Federal Government to be a better partner in helping them do what they know has to be done to fight this epidemic. As I said, on Tuesday I was in Dayton. There have been over 400 overdoses just this year in Dayton. By some measure, Dayton, OH, has been named the top big city in America for overdoses--not something we are proud of. These 400 overdoses are going to be helped by a new program that was just launched and announced on Tuesday--I was there for the announcement--called the Front Door Initiative. It will get treatment to those who have overdosed. Once they are clean, it will get them skill training, help them find a job, and teach them how to be better moms and dads. The notion is that instead of putting people into prison, get them into treatment. It is a diversion program that is going to be customized and personalized for the particular person's problems. Through looking at what works and what doesn't work, we have found that is an effective way to get people back on track. This innovation is happening in other places, too, around Ohio. Sheriff Tharp in Lucas County is doing some very innovative stuff-- again, connecting people whom they arrest with treatment. In my view, it is going to be more effective, more compassionate, and it will also save taxpayer dollars. I thank Sheriff Phil Plummer, the Cornerstone Project, and the entire Montgomery County Drug-Free Coalition in Dayton, OH, for their daily fight to get treatment to those who need it and help people get their lives back on track. The conference report that has just been voted out will help. It will help law enforcement agencies like those in Dayton and Lucas County and other places around Ohio find alternatives to incarceration. Ohioans are taking action, and they expect Congress to take appropriate action too. This is a crisis. They want the Federal Government to be a better partner. They have been patient. Let me just say respectfully that, in my view, this is not like every other issue we address here. And we address some very important issues, as we did yesterday on sanctuary cities, issues that relate to spending bills, but this is about saving lives and allowing people to achieve their God-given purpose in life by not getting off track and not being casualties of this addiction epidemic. I think this is urgent. And for those who might say ``Well, what hope is there? How can more money help?'' I will tell you, No. 1, it is money that will be wisely spent. That is how it will help. Secondly, if it is well spent, treatment can work and it does work. Recovery can work and it does work. There are so many stories I can tell because I have been at over a dozen treatment centers around Ohio and spoken to hundreds of recovering addicts and heard so many stories. Let me tell you one about Bethani Temple from Prospect, OH. When she was 18 years old, her dad died of cancer. To help her cope with her grief, she tried one of the pain killers he had been prescribed. He had pain medication for his cancer, and she was grieving, so she thought she would try one of these pain killers, and she became addicted to these pain killers. Soon they were too expensive and not as accessible as something else, which was heroin. Bethani became addicted to heroin. While she was addicted, she gave birth to a daughter who was dependent on opioids. By the way, there has been a 750-percent increase in babies born in Ohio in the last 12 years who are dependent on opioids. It is tragic. Bethani's boyfriend got into a car accident while he was high on heroin and he died. Bethani was eventually arrested. Fortunately, she was in an area of Ohio where, although she got arrested, they helped get her into treatment. They diverted her into treatment. She got help. Bethani was the very first graduate of the Marion Ohio Court family dependency treatment program. It is a drug court. We had a roundtable discussion in Marion with Bethani and others and got to see some other young women who have been able to benefit from that. Her daughter got treatment, too, by the way. Now they are both healthy--and not just healthy; Bethani is now a college graduate, she is now married with two kids, and she is now the coordinator of the same program that got her back on track and, as she would say, saved her. She is the coordinator there, and she is helping others get their lives back on track as she did. She is beating this because she got the right treatment for her, the right recovery program for her. Mr. President, this is personal for me. It is personal for all of us--it should be. I know too many people who have gotten caught up in this grip of addiction. I know too many families who have gone through what may be viewed by some as the ultimate grief, which is to have your child predecease you because that child got involved with prescription drugs, then heroin, and then overdosed. Two families I have gotten to know lost their children because when their children had their wisdom teeth taken out, they were given pain medication and they got addicted to the pills and then heroin. These were teenagers who had to have their wisdom teeth taken out. These families are waiting, but they need help, and we need to give it to them. I would urge my colleagues to set the politics aside. This is not a partisan issue. It hasn't been from the start. This is an issue of helping the people we represent. For all those people who voted for the legislation as it came through--94 to 1--remember, all that has changed is that there is more money in this bill now than there was before. Remember, in the 117 days since you voted for this legislation, over 10,000 Americans have died, including Americans in each of our States. Remember, there is an election every 2 years. There is always going to be politics. This needs to come above politics. We need to get this done, and we need to get it done now. I yield the floor.

Mr. PORTMAN

Mr. PORTMAN. Mr. President, I rise tonight to talk about an issue that is facing every single State represented in this Chamber and every community in America. Over the past week, we have talked about the potential Zika epidemic and the need for us to address that, and I agree, but there is another epidemic that is already here, and that is this issue of prescription drugs and heroin and the addiction that follows. Far too many overdoses are occurring in our communities. There are people who are losing their lives. There are casualties beyond the overdose deaths. There are people who have seen their families broken apart because of the addiction, and because the drug becomes everything, they are unable to go to work. We have seen the devastation in our communities in terms of the crime and violence connected with the drug trade, and we have seen, unfortunately, babies increasingly born with addiction. These babies are in every neonatal unit in America. I know these babies are in every one of the hospitals in my home State of Ohio. There has been a 750- percent increase in the number of these babies in the State of Ohio in the last dozen years. It has gotten to the point where deaths from overdoses from heroin and prescription drugs, opioids, now exceed the deaths from auto accidents. It is the No. 1 cause of accidental deaths in my home State of Ohio. Based on the latest data I have seen, I believe that is now true for our entire country. Ohio has been particularly hard hit. We are probably in the top five based on all the data I have seen. My State is probably No. 1 in the country in terms of a particular kind of overdose, a synthetic form of heroin called fentanyl. It is devastating. On average, 129 people die every day from these overdoses. That is why this Senate, over the last 3 years, has worked hard to pull together legislation that addresses this issue. It specifically says: Let's figure out smarter and better ways to have better education, prevention, treatment, and recovery to help our law enforcement be able to deal with this problem. We worked with 130 groups around the country, all of whom have now endorsed the legislation we spent 3 years putting together. We had five conferences here in Washington. We brought in experts from around the country. We didn't do it in a bipartisan way; we did it in a nonpartisan way. In other words, we didn't care who had the idea-- Democrat, Republican, Independent. It didn't matter. What mattered was whether it was a good idea and whether it would help to address this growing epidemic we are facing in our States and around the country. That legislation passed the U.S. Senate. It was on the floor for about 2\1/2\ weeks. There was a long debate, but at the end of that debate, after people became familiar with this issue--some of whom were already very familiar with this issue; some of whom, frankly, were not in this Chamber--many of them would go home and talk about this legislation. They learned more about it from their communities, their schools, and their firehouses. When they came back, after 2\1/2\ weeks of debate, the vote for this legislation called the Comprehensive Addiction and Recovery Act, otherwise known as CARA, was not close; it was 94 to 1. That never happens around this place. It happened because we took our time, did it right, and focused on evidence-based treatment, recovery, and prevention--stuff that actually works to improve what we are doing and that was also responsible. This legislation also passed because it is such a big issue in every State and every community. It has been 110 days since the Senate passed CARA. By the way, earlier I said that 129 people, on average, are dying every day of overdoses. That means that in those 110 days since the Senate passed the legislation, over 13,000 of our fellow Americans have succumbed and died from an overdose of opioids. Think about that. Think of those numbers. Why isn't it done yet? It is not done yet because the House needed to move through its own process. I totally understand that. You should know that the House was part of the process for the last 3 years. This was not just bipartisan; it was bicameral. In other words, both the House and Senate were involved. We had 130 cosponsors of the CARA legislation in the House, but the House wanted to go through their own process, and they did. They came up with 18 separate bills rather than 1 more comprehensive bill. We are now in the process of putting those together. We have 18 bills from the House and 1 from the Senate. The conference committee has been named. Today I am happy to announce that the conference is actually going to meet on Wednesday of next week. They are going to vote on the final product. After having talked to a number of members of the conference committee today and over the past several weeks, I think it is going to be a very positive product. It will be very similar to the Senate bill in terms of being comprehensive, but it also picks up a number of good items that the House added. There is one that I particularly like. It would raise the cap on how many people can be treated with Suboxone, which is one of the ways to have medicated-assisted treatment, and in particular at the treatment center, which is a good change. We do believe that the provisions we included in CARA over here are necessary because it is comprehensive and does include prevention and education. We think some of our prevention programs, which are not in the House, are necessary. We think that particularly on the treatment and recovery side--especially on the recovery side--there are some things that need to be added. I get very good reports as to the progress of that conference, and I believe it will be something that I can not only support but enthusiastically support if they can stick to the blueprint they have worked on. Again, that bill will be next week. That is a positive sign. This is the 11th time I have come to the floor of the Senate to urge them to act. We have been in session for 11 weeks since the bill passed. Every single week, I have come to the floor to talk about this, and I have the best report yet in the sense that we are moving forward. This week I sent a letter, along with my colleagues, Senator Whitehouse, Senator Klobuchar, and Senator Ayotte. This letter went to the conference committee to insist that the legislation be, in fact, comprehensive, and I believe from what I am hearing that it will be-- the prevention grants, the Opiate Awareness Campaign, the law enforcement task forces, the education grants to educate those who are behind bars. There were other great ideas that came from both sides of the aisle that should be included. I must say tonight, though, that I am hearing some other troubling reports, and these have now become public, so I am going to talk about them. The Senate passed this bill 94 to 1. It is an emergency and an epidemic in our communities. There are 130 anti-drug groups from across the country who have endorsed this legislation. Everybody is together on this, and we worked hard to make it inclusive. Again, 13,000 Americans have died from overdoses since this legislation passed the Senate. Despite all of that, there are press reports that say the White House is encouraging us to delay. I hope that is not true, but here is the first report that I will tell you about. National Public Radio talks about a White House meeting with some Democratic Members of Congress about potentially stalling CARA. One White House legislative aide is quoted as saying: ``We need to slow down the conference enough so that the White House can bring it back to the American people. We need help in slowing it down.'' The piece went on to say that ``Democratic members of Congress were asked to come to this meeting and they were eager to help slow it down.'' Slow it down? Are you kidding? Slow it down? We should have sped it up, and we certainly can't stop now. The Senate is only in session for 2 more weeks, and then it goes out of session for the conventions and the August recess. We should have already done it. Let's not slow it down; let's speed it up. I will tell you something else that I learned today, which I found amazing, and I hope the way I am looking at it or the way I am reading about it is not accurate. The drug czar for the United States of America is Michael Botticelli. He has testified in favor of this legislation and came to three of our five conferences and testified in favor of it. We took his ideas and input, which were very helpful. He came to the hearing in the Judiciary Committee and, in response to a question from Senator Whitehouse, a leading Democrat on that committee and coauthor of this legislation, said he thought this was a good bill and that it was important that it be comprehensive. He also went to New Hampshire for a hearing and said he supported the legislation in front of Senator Shaheen and Senator Ayotte. He was supposed to come to Ohio but at the last minute decided he could not attend our hearing in Ohio. I was told that yesterday he held a press briefing with Ohio reporters. I have been trying to reach him today unsuccessfully, but apparently he thought it was necessary to go to Ohio reporters to talk about this issue. Among those on the call, by the way, was at least one Democratic local official. Maybe there were a few. I am not sure because I wasn't told about the call to Ohio. I am from Ohio. I am the coauthor of the bill. In that call, he said things that led the reporters to believe that he thought CARA did not go far enough and that it wasn't the appropriate response to this epidemic. Look, I understand there is an election every 2 years here in America, and that is fine, but I have known every single drug czar since the first one, Bill Bennett. I have worked with every single one of them. Many of them have remained close friends. General McCaffrey was the drug czar for Bill Clinton when I authored a few pieces of legislation, such as the drug-free media campaign legislation, the Drug-Free Workplace Act, the Drug-Free Communities Support Program, which has generated over $1.3 billion of Federal dollars--matching funds. It helps to bond more than 2,000 community coalitions, including a community coalition in my hometown that I founded over 20 years ago. I have been at this for a long time in terms of addressing this issue of drug addiction and drug abuse, and I worked with every single one of the drug czars. I have never seen them be partisan, ever. I am very disappointed to hear these press reports about the White House wanting to delay. I am now, of course, very disappointed to hear that the drug czar is out there saying negative things about the CARA legislation when he, in fact, was part of putting it together. He, in fact, testified in favor of it. I don't understand that. I don't get it. Let's put politics aside and actually get something done. Perhaps some of the parents who come to me and tell me about having lost a son or a daughter need to talk to some other Members of the Congress and of the administration who think this is somehow a political game. This is about saving lives. It is about saving people from ruining their lives. It is about helping people to be able to achieve their God-given purpose. Our legislation is incredibly important. I mentioned some of the specifics of it. It does have grant programs that we know work. It has evidence-based programs. It includes medication treatment that works better. We know there are a lot of relapses, and we are trying to get the money into things that actually work. But it is bigger than that. It is about changing our attitude about this issue here in the Senate and in the House of Representatives. I would think that anybody who follows this closely--certainly someone who is the head of the Office of National Drug Control Policy--would get that. This legislation begins to treat addiction like a disease that needs to be treated just like other diseases. Even if we didn't have $100 million of new funding in here, even if we didn't have all of these new specific grant programs and things we know work, like veterans courts and drug courts and all the recovery grant money that goes out, including to high school and colleges for recovery groups that work, it would be significant just because it establishes this new approach, saying that addiction is not a moral failure, addiction is a disease. Through this, we hope to wipe away the stigma so people do come forward and get treatment. It will help families who won't talk about the disease feel comfortable in saying: You have a problem, and we are going to support you. We are going to get you into treatment so you can pull your life, your family, and communities back together. That is what this legislation is about. This is an authorization bill. It is not a spending bill. Everybody who follows this process knows that. Apparently the concern that has been raised is, well, there is not enough additional appropriated money in here. Well, this is not an appropriations bill. By the way, the Appropriations Committee, at the urging of those of us who coauthored this legislation, have increased the funding substantially this year, and they have made a commitment in the subcommittee and the full committee to have a 93-percent increase in funding for this next year. As I said, this authorizes about $100 million more every year going forward in our legislation as well, but frankly I think the appropriations ought to be greater than that. This is an emergency, but we are going down the right track there with these appropriations commitments that have been made. We need to be sure we have that commitment all the way to the final spending bills this year because we do need to have adequate funding, particularly to make sure everybody who wants treatment can get it. I had a tele-townhall meeting this week, where 25,000 people were on the call at one time. It was a big group of people. As usual, people talked about terrorism, they talked about jobs and the economy, but three different people called in on this drug abuse issue. Two of them were recovering addicts, one was a parent. They talked about the worth of the legislation, the importance of treatment, the importance for us to deal with this issue. They talked about the fact that this knows no ZIP Code, it is not an inner city problem, it is not a suburban problem; it is everywhere. I spoke to a woman named Leigh from Zanesville, OH. She told me she is now in recovery. She volunteers at prisons and told me that most of the prisoners there are also drug users. We talked about the CARA recovery provisions. They include critical resources to develop recovery and support services, individuals and families. We talked about the fact that in this legislation we have grants that can go to prisons to deal with this substance abuse issue in prison so when people get out, they have had the treatment to be able to get their lives back together and get out of that revolving door of the criminal justice system, where more than half of the people who get out are right back in again within a few years. I talked to a man named John from Grove City. He told me he lost his son on June 1, just a few weeks ago, to an overdose of heroin laced with synthetic drugs. I expressed my condolences to him and his family, but I also thanked him for calling and for his willingness, in front of 25,000 people, to talk about this issue. He was very plainspoken. He said: My son was addicted to heroin for 5 years. ``It meant more to him than his family; it meant more to him than anything.'' Unfortunately, there are fathers and mothers all over the State of Ohio who are experiencing what John had to experience with his son. He wants us to pass this legislation because he thinks it is going to help, and it will. I think those who are addicted, those families who are being affected by this have been very patient. They are looking for more help from Washington, and they deserve it. Washington is not going to solve this problem. It is going to be solved in our communities, in our families, and in our hearts. But Washington can help and be a better partner, take the existing funds we are spending and spend them more wisely to actually affect the number of people who get addicted in the first place with better prevention and through better education, and then for those who are addicted, better treatment and recovery; help them get back on their feet. Washington can help. That is what this legislation does. It is making Washington a better partner with State and local government and the nonprofits that are in the trenches doing the hard work every day. I hope these reports I am hearing about delay and these tactics that are being used, unbelievably, by the administration to somehow make it appear as though this legislation isn't what they said it was back when they helped put it together and when they testified in favor of it--I hope that is just a distraction, and I hope people understand the significance of getting this done and getting it done now. It is already past time. We can't wait. Again, people have been patient. It is now time for the U.S. Congress to face this issue, to address it through legislation that went through here with a 94-to-1 vote, to send it to the President for his signature and, more importantly, to send it to our communities around our country to begin to help turn the tide, save lives, and bring back hope. Thank you, Mr. President. I yield the floor.

Mr. PORTMAN. Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that the order for the quorum call be rescinded.

Mr. PORTMAN

Mr. PORTMAN. Madam President, I thank my friend and colleague from West Virginia. I appreciate his passion for this issue. Over the years, he has fought hard for miners in every different respect, as has his colleague from West Virginia who is in the chair right now, Senator Capito. They need us right now. He is absolutely right. We have a bill on the floor of the U.S. Senate that provides for essentially the bankruptcy of Puerto Rico, right? I am not being critical of that legislation. I know Puerto Rico needs help, but I also know the people I represent need help, as do the people these two Senators represent and Senator Brown who spoke earlier. All we are asking for is give us a chance. We have legislation that has been carefully crafted with the United Mine Workers, with the coal companies on a bipartisan basis. This is legislation that is fiscally responsible. My own view, for what it is worth, is that if we don't help now, it is very likely there could be later a need for significant funding from the taxpayers. Why? Unfortunately, because we are in a situation now, where because of all these bankruptcies of all these coal companies--and we could talk about the policies toward the coal companies and the policies toward coal in this country, but the reality is, there are a lot of companies in places like Ohio and West Virginia and Virginia and other States out West that are either in bankruptcy or heading toward bankruptcy. The people who are getting left behind are these coal miners who worked hard, played by the rules, have their pension, have their health care lined up, and because of the bankruptcies they find themselves on the outside. By the way, currently these mine workers' pensions are relatively modest--$530 per month is the average. They are headed toward bankruptcy, by the way, within 5 to 10 years. There are 90,000 coal miners--my colleague said closer to 100,000--a little over 90,000 coal miners affected. In Ohio alone, it is over 6,000 coal miners. When that pension goes bankrupt in 5 to 10 years, there is no guarantee, as I see it, that the PBGC--that is the Pension Guaranty Benefit Corporation--is going to be there because that agency is also in trouble. So these mine workers who sacrificed so much for so long working in the mines--again, working hard, playing by the rules, helped power this Nation--could be left with no pensions. That is simply not acceptable. There is a further issue that some folks aren't focused on yet but will be soon in a lot of ours States; that is, that there are about 20,000 of these retired coal miners who may well lose their retiree health coverage at the end of this year. So this is not down the road. This is now. This is this year. Again, these miners spent their careers in dangerous jobs. These jobs resulted in higher rates of injury, disease, cancer, and therefore they are especially dependent on these health benefits. They have earned them. It would be devastating to those families to lose those benefits. Our solution--again, a bipartisan solution--Senator Capito is here and Senator Manchin and Senator Brown and others--our solution is to have no interruption of these family health benefits, keep the pension plan solvent so it doesn't go under, so we don't have to have a bailout, and we can do it with a fund that is currently available. Senator Manchin spoke for a moment about how this is something that can be handled under our current fiscal situation. As some of my colleagues know, I am a fiscal hawk, and I wouldn't have signed up for this bill if I didn't see a way to pay for it. The money would come from a miners' health fund that is currently spending over about half of its annual allocation. The fund allows for $490 million in annual spending for retired miners. Currently, it is spending closer to $225 million. So that fund is available. Our point is this: Why not use the rest of that spending authority for that fund to be able to spend the money to save the miners' pensions and make sure they are not going to lose their health care coverage? Again, I think this solution may well cost less money than simply allowing the plan to go bankrupt, which is the other alternative, because then I think it is very likely that you would end up with a major bailout and the taxpayers would have to pick up the rest. So who are these miners? In the last several years, I have been at some of the coal mines in Ohio. I have been in aboveground coal mines and underground 600 feet with the coal miners. I have had an opportunity to visit three coal mines, one of them twice. Coal miners also come to a lot of my meetings. They come, they speak up, and they talk about why they believe they deserve to be treated fairly. They have powered this Nation. Ohio is 70-percent coal-dependent right now for electricity. Many States represented here are even higher. For some, virtually all their electricity comes from coal. It is a hard job. Again, when you are underground several hundred feet and you see the kind of work they do, you learn to appreciate the fact that they are taking a risk every day and they do have additional health problems because of it. These are people who not only power our country, but power their communities. They are engaged and involved in their communities, and they want to be sure these smaller rural communities can stay vibrant. Losing that pension and losing that health care benefit obviously hurts those communities. These are people who played by the rules, as I said earlier. They are patriotic, hardworking Americans who deserve our help right now because of this pending bankruptcy. Why on this bill? It is not about my opposition to the underlying bill, but it is about my insistence that we have a vote, and I intend not to vote to move forward with the Puerto Rico bill unless we get our vote, and it is appropriate. If we are going to help Puerto Rico escape bankruptcy, then we should also help the 90,000 miners we talked about in West Virginia, Ohio, and other States who are suffering the effects of these coal bankruptcies. They don't deserve to be left behind as the Senate addresses other bankruptcies. Again, I want to thank my colleagues who are here. The Presiding Officer kindly took the chair so I could make these remarks. I will replace her now and have an opportunity to listen to the debate from the chair. I thank my colleagues for their willingness to stand up at this crucial time to say that this is our opportunity to be heard. That is all I am asking for. Let's have a vote. I think if we did have a vote and all my colleagues knew the facts around this issue, I think we would be successful and we would be able to help a lot of these miners to get the benefits that they deserve. I yield back to my colleague.

Mr. PORTMAN

Mr. PORTMAN. Mr. President, today I wish to honor the Congregation B'nai Israel of Sylvania, OH, as it celebrates its 150th anniversary. It was founded in 1866 by 17 families and grew to 140 members by 1908. Its first permanent synagogue was constructed in 1913 and is now listed on the National Register of Historical Places. Today the congregation serves over 425 members at the Jewish Community Center of Sylvania. These members are drawn from across northwest Ohio and southeast Michigan. Congregation B'nai Israel's mission is to make the practice of Judaism an integral part of its members' daily lives while working in cooperation with the Jewish community. It does this by creating an accessible synagogue that encourages all of its members to study, worship, engage in acts of loving kindness, and build K'lal Yisrael. In addition, they have long promoted the equal participation of men and women in Jewish religious life, a significant goal in the Judaism Conservative movement. It has a long history of community outreach, ranging from the development of war relief programs and welcoming Holocaust survivors throughout the 1940s, to volunteering at nearby community centers and nursing homes, to mission trips in South Africa. I am here today to honor Congregation B'nai Israel. I congratulate all who were involved in making its first 150 years a success.

Mr. PORTMAN

Mr. PORTMAN. Mr. President, today I wish to recognize Columbus Metropolitan Library, CML, and its Main Library in downtown Columbus. This week, the CML Main Library will celebrate its third major opening since being dedicated on April 4, 1907. It has recently undergone a major $35 million restoration that will help revitalize downtown Columbus for years to come and provide significant resources to the people of Columbus. Since its opening in 1907, CML Main Library has served its community with distinction. In 2014, CML Main Library had 725,000 visitors and a circulation of 1.35 million. CML Main Library engages with the community through service programs such as Homework Help Centers, Reading Buddies, and Summer Reading Club for Kindergarten. It also provides resources to help our community reach its potential with college and career readiness, GED help, adult learning, and job assistance. CML has been recognized as a leading library in our Nation. The vision of CML is to achieve ``a thriving community where wisdom prevails.'' In 2011, CML was named a National Medal Winner by the Institute for Museum and Library Services for its work in community service, which is the highest honor for libraries and museums. CML has also been rated a 5-star library for 7 of the last 8 years by the Library Journal. The work that is being done by the CML is commendable, and I am confident that the restoration of the CML Main Library will add to its success in the future. I extend my congratulations to all who were involved in reaching this important milestone.

Mr. PORTMAN

Mr. PORTMAN. Mr. President, today I wish to honor an American hero, a former marine, a former astronaut, a former U.S. Senator, and a friend, John Glenn. I also wish to celebrate renaming Port Columbus International Airport, Port Columbus, the John Glenn Columbus International Airport. John Glenn is a former Marine Corps aviator and veteran of both the Second World War and the Korean war. He became the first American to orbit the Earth on February 20, 1962. After retirement from his position at NASA, John Glenn served as a member of the U.S. Senate, representing his home State of Ohio from 1974 until 1999. John Glenn is the last surviving member of a group of military test pilots known as the Mercury Seven, who participated in the early stages of space exploration in the United States. Glenn was one of America's first astronauts whom NASA selected to fly the Project Mercury spacecraft. He would later return to space in 1998, becoming the oldest person to go into space. In the same year of his return to space, John Glenn helped found the John Glenn Institute of Public Service and Public Policy at the Ohio State University which recently has grown and expanded to become the John Glenn College of Public Affairs. It is one of the best public policy colleges in the country, and I am honored to serve on the advisory board. I have seen firsthand how his legacy is helping to create future leaders. Port Columbus is one of the most important economic resources for Central Ohio. Port Columbus provides more than 33,000 jobs and has an annual economic output of $3.7 billion. Port Columbus serves nearly 6.8 million passengers each year. It is fitting that this important landmark be renamed to honor John Glenn, someone who has contributed so much to the aerospace and aviation industry. I am honored to recognize John Glenn and the John Glenn Columbus International Airport, and I congratulate all who were involved in this accomplishment.

Mr. PORTMAN

Mr. PORTMAN. Mr. President, I rise to join my colleague from the other side of the aisle, Senator Brown, who came to the floor earlier to congratulate Mayor Andy Ginther of Columbus, OH, and the people of Columbus, OH, and Central Ohio for a big victory this week. We won the Federal Department of Transportation's Smart City grant competition. This is something we have been working on for months. It is a big deal to us in Central Ohio. It gives us the opportunity to get $40 million in terms of a grant from the Department of Transportation to be a model city and also in combination with another grant of $10 million from Vulcan Corporation and $90 million that has been raised in the private sector--that is a total of about $140 million to reshape transportation in Central Ohio to create more economic growth for the citizens of Central Ohio and to be a model not just for Ohio but for the rest of the country on how we can use smart transportation to help create economic growth and opportunity. I want to thank U.S. Secretary of Transportation Foxx for getting this decision exactly right. As I have said to Secretary Foxx about this competition over the past several months, I believe this is the right investment for our tax dollars. I believe Columbus is the right city. I believe we have done all the right things to be the proper recipient for this. I was honored to help set up meetings between Secretary Foxx and Mayor Andy Ginther. Secretary Foxx was always a thoughtful and respectful listener, and ultimately he made the right decision. It was a tough competition. We had 77 other cities submit applications, and among the finalists were some very impressive cities, very innovative cities-- Austin, Kansas City, Denver, Pittsburgh, Portland, San Francisco. It is easy to see why the right choice was to invest in Columbus. It is the fastest growing city in the Midwest in terms of jobs and in terms of population. It is one of the top seven centers in the country for foreign trade now. By the way, that places a lot of pressure on our transportation system with this growth and with the increase in trade. There is a need for us to be sure our infrastructure keeps up with that success. This Smart City grant will help us ensure that happens. I thank and commend the more than 100 organizations from Central Ohio that were part of this that expressed interest in working with Columbus on improving this infrastructure--organizations such as the Battelle research institute, the Ohio State University and their research on transportation, Clean Fuels Ohio, and the IBM Analytics Data Center. The Ohio State University had other departments involved in this, as well, in terms of engineering and so on, and dozens of others. I also thank the leadership of the Columbus Partnership. Alex Fischer did a terrific job of bringing the business community together on this. I mentioned that they also have put $90 million of private sector investment into this. It is clearly one where the Federal dollars are being leveraged and more than matched. I convened a meeting in Columbus several weeks ago at the Ohio State University Center for Automotive Research with many of these organizations that are part of this grant application. We talked about the need not just to work together on this grant but to ensure that Columbus and Central Ohio were on the map in terms of being centers for transportation excellence. We have some of the companies there, such as Honda and some of the suppliers, but we also have a lot of the research folks there and a lot of people who are interested in making sure the community becomes more prosperous by helping to move people. It is almost as though physical mobility through transportation is part of economic mobility in Columbus. We see it that way. I think it is absolutely true. I was pleased to lead in a letter from the entire Ohio delegation, along with Sherrod Brown and all of my colleagues in the House-- Democrat and Republican alike--in support of this effort. It was bipartisan. It was from the entire State. We were unanimous that Columbus is a sound investment that the Federal Government ought to make. I thank Mayor Andy Ginther for taking the leadership role in getting this done. It was a team effort and a good example of how the public sector and the private sector can work together to help move our country forward--in this case, to give Central Ohio the chance to show how to move the country forward literally in terms of our transportation movement. The credit ultimately goes to the city of Columbus. They will put that $140 million to good use, improving our infrastructure, spurring economic development and jobs. It is a proposal to form a partnership with the Central Ohio Transit Authority, the Mid-Ohio Regional Planning Commission, the Ohio Department of Transportation, Ohio State's Transportation Research Center, which I talked about earlier, and other partners in a five-part strategy, a very specific strategy--access to jobs, logistics, connecting visitors and tourists, connecting citizens and sustainability. Let me briefly talk about some of these parts of the strategy. As I mentioned, we are creating a lot of jobs in Columbus with these new jobs. We have to be sure workers can commute easily and safely. We are going to study ways in which to move people, not just from suburb to suburb but also to ensure that people who are living in neighborhoods that have high rates of poverty have an access to jobs through the transportation improvement. We have a neighborhood in Columbus called Linden. It is one of the neighborhoods that will be particularly impacted positively by this improvement. The Linden neighborhood has its challenges. I visited many neighborhoods in Columbus that have challenges, despite the economic growth we talked about. Franklinton is one and South Side is another. We talked about our efforts to spur economic growth, how to fight drug abuse, how to help people who deserve a second chance get one, and how to bring jobs to those communities. The one thing I hear about is the difficulty with transportation--how to literally find a job and then get to that job. People don't have cars, and they have difficulty finding the bus routes that work for these jobs. Unfortunately, some of the jobs are not close to these neighborhoods. This is an opportunity, through this new innovative transportation plan, to connect people to the jobs that are there. By making it easier for residents to travel to and from jobs and schools, we can improve the future of these communities and these families. Credit is another issue that this proposal will help with. A lot of people who live in these neighborhoods have lack of access to credit. Think about it. Whether it is getting on the Metro bus or using some other form of transportation, such as the car2go or other transportation methods, credit is really important. This project will include looking for innovative ways to bring people off the sidelines and enable them to get around easier by providing credit for transportation. Columbus also plans to use the grant funds to improve travel information and broadband Internet access and to deploy self-driving cars to connect the East Transit Center to local employers. Columbus has one of the only cargo-dedicated airports in the world. A lot of freight moves through Central Ohio. We have the most truckstops of any State in the union. Some 60 percent of U.S. manufacturing facilities and 50 percent of U.S. consumers can be reached within a day's drive of Columbus. So it is a big transportation hub. I have met with a number of companies, such as Avnet, which anticipates more and more trucks on the road to and from the Rickenbacker Inland Port--again, this is our airfreight center for Columbus--because of this continuing growth. The city of Columbus plans to build a smartphone app for trucks with real-time traffic conditions and routing data for delivery of freight to better ensure efficiency on our roads. This is good for everyone. It is certainly good not only for our transportation companies and trucks but also in terms of safety and efficiency and good for commuters and all drivers. Another reason for the city's success is that we have so many people now visiting Columbus. Visitors spend about $5.7 billion every year in Columbus. That gives the city a total economic impact of $8.7 billion and supports 71,000 jobs for Ohioans. We need to be sure we continue to find ways to have the smart transportation project work with this increasing number of visitors. We plan to work with organizations like Experience Columbus to build a smartphone app to provide real-time information relating to events in the city for visitors, parking, traffic, and transit options. By helping visitors get around easier, we can help improve their experience in the city and also make Columbus even more attractive to more visitors and stimulate increased economic activity and jobs. These are some of the things that are going to happen as part of the Smart City grant. We also intend to focus on sustainability, and that would be to increase the use of cleaner ways of transporting people and goods. We will be expanding the electric-vehicle charging infrastructure and converting more of the city's bus system to compressed natural gas. The electric vehicles will reduce carbon emissions even as we are increasing transportation capabilities. This investment will not only have a positive impact on jobs but also on the environment. It is a win-win. Again, I congratulate Secretary Foxx on making a good investment decision, one that will help Columbus make history and create opportunities for Ohioans, and, most importantly, congratulations again for all of Central Ohio and those who put together this incredible application. I look forward to working with them closely to ensure that the money is well spent and that this project does indeed become a model for the rest of Ohio and the rest of our country. I thank the Presiding Officer, and I yield back my time. I suggest the absence of a quorum.

Mr. PORTMAN

Mr. PORTMAN. I thank my colleague, and I thank the Presiding Officer. Wow, what an incredible week for Cleveland. While we are talking today, there are several hundred thousand fans walking down the streets in Cleveland in an awesome parade. As much as I appreciate being in the Senate doing my constitutional duty in my day job, I wish I were there. I know Senator Brown feels the same way. Because we cannot be there, we wanted to provide the resolution today at the time of the parade and be sure that all of our colleagues know how proud we are of the Cavs and get them on record. We are trying not to rub it in too much with our California colleagues, although I will now say I have a case of Great Lakes beer in my refrigerator that otherwise would have gone to one of my Senate colleagues, Senator Feinstein. Instead, I get a case of California wine. That is nice because last year it was the other way around. What an amazing season and incredible finals. I did get a chance to go to some of the games. I lived in Cleveland for a brief time when I was a kid. At that time, Cleveland was not known as a great sports town. Jimmy Brown and the Cleveland Browns were our last team to win a championship in 1964. Fifty-two years is a long time. The drought is over, and the Cavs did it in the Northeast way. Northeast Ohio is an area where, through grit and determination and perseverance, we are on the way back up. We are a comeback region. Cleveland is a comeback city, and that is exactly what happened. In many respects, the way we won the finals is the way we worked through the season with some of the challenges we had. We changed coaches in midstream, and every single player showed grit and determination. Whether it was Iman Shumpert or Kevin Love or certainly Kyrie Irving and that incredible 3-pointer in the seventh game, Tristan Thompson, and then, of course, the king--he really willed victory that night. Game 7--you saw the blocked shot at the end. You saw his layup at the end. He did get a triple-double that night. He not only got a triple-double, but throughout the entire series, he was a star in the sense that--and this has never happened in the finals before, ever. He did have more blocked shots, he did have more assists, he did have more points, he did have more rebounds, and he did have more steals than any player on either team. When you think about that, it is extraordinary. In my view, he is the greatest basketball player living today, and he will go down in history, because of this one series, as being the guy who really pulled Cleveland over the line. I went to the fourth game. This was the game we lost in Cleveland. We were down 3 to 1. No one has ever come back to win a series being down 3 to 1 in the finals, ever. But the fans did not give up that night. More importantly, the players I talked about and the other players who came off the bench and did an awesome job never gave up. They never gave up because they had that grit and perseverance which characterizes Northeast Ohio and because they wanted to make good on the promise. When LeBron James came back to Cleveland, what did he say? He said: I am going to bring my hometown, my home area, a championship. Born and raised in Akron, he was a high school player who was a phenomenon. He is a guy who loves his State, loves Northeast Ohio. I think he summed it all up when he came back and said: I am going to deliver a championship. I think he was very emotional after game 7, in part because his goal, his dream--not for himself but for Cleveland--was finally accomplished. About Cleveland and Northeast Ohio, he says it is an area where you work hard and you earn it. He said that you don't get success just for your talent, just through showing up; you get your success by working hard and earning it. That is a great message. It is a message that he has imbued in the minds of young people all over Northeast Ohio, specifically in Akron, where so many young men and young women have been able to be more successful in life thanks to his efforts, his funding his foundation to help them get through high school and get into college. He has told them: This is about grit, perseverance, hard work, and discipline. You don't just get there because of your talent. He is probably the most talented athlete I know, but, as we saw in game 7, it wasn't just about talent, it was about perseverance, determination, and focus. I am very proud of the Cavs. I am very proud of the way they won. I am proud of Cleveland. As you know, the Republican convention is coming up in Cleveland. Someone asked me today: Do you think they will take down the Cavs posters? I said: I hope not. This is all part of a big celebration. It was great for Cleveland in terms of the hotels and restaurants being full, certainly great for the economy to have the finals, but more importantly, it is great for the spirit of Cleveland and consistent with the comeback city, consistent with this notion that, yes, we have had tough times before, we have had our share of challenges in Cleveland, and we still do, but we are Believeland, Cleveland. We believe. We believe that through hard work and perseverance, we can make progress and we can be successful, just as the Cavs were during this final series. I also thank Dan Gilbert, the owner of the team. He is the guy who worked hard to get the team back together, to get the band back together. I am sure bringing together Kyrie Irving, Kevin Love, Tristan Thompson, and certainly the king, LeBron James--you know it is not easy to bring all those players together and make it all work and gel, but Gilbert believed. Gilbert believes in Cleveland. He is a Detroit guy, but he believes in Cleveland. He has made a big investment in Cleveland in other ways in the community and in the economic development there, and certainly what the Cavs just did assisted in that. Ultimately, this is a celebration, not just because they won the finals, but because of the way they did it. It was a tough season. They switched coaches in midstream. They had some injuries back and forth. They did it the hard way--through perseverance, determination, and hard work. I am proud of Cleveland. Senator Brown and I are proud to have this resolution before the Senate today. We are pleased it passed with unanimous consent. That doesn't happen with everything in the U.S. Congress, as some of you may have noticed, but it certainly happens here because in this case the Cavaliers earned it. You earn it in Northeast Ohio, and that is what they did. I am proud of them. Thank you for allowing us to present this resolution. And Go Cavs. We are all in. Mr. President, I suggest the absence of a quorum.

Mr. PORTMAN

Mr. PORTMAN. I thank the Senator. Mass Shooting in Orlando and Fighting Terrorism

Mr. PORTMAN. Mr. President, I rise today to talk about the heroin and prescription drug epidemic that is tearing families apart and devastating communities in every one of the States represented in this Chamber. I rise today for the 10th time since this body, the Senate, passed CARA--the Comprehensive Addiction and Recovery Act--by a vote of 94 to 1. It took us 2\1/2\ weeks on the floor to get that done. It took 3 years of work to build up the right consensus, but we got it done. The House then proceeded over time to pass 18 separate bills dealing with this issue, and now we are in conference with the House. As I have said in every speech I have given over the last 10 weeks we have been in session since that time, we need to move and move quickly, and there is no excuse for inaction. I am going to continue to come to the floor and talk to my colleagues on both sides of the aisle, leadership on both sides of the Capitol, on this issue until we get it done. Why? Because this is an emergency. This is not just another issue that Congress should take up; this is one that is affecting every single community in America. Sadly, it is getting worse, not better. Every week when I come to the floor, unfortunately, I come with new news. I come with information that has come to my attention since my previous talk on the floor about what is happening in our communities, and I will do that again today. There is some good news, and that is that since I spoke on the floor last week, the Senate Appropriations Committee has voted to increase funding to deal with this opioid issue--this is heroin, prescription drugs, and this new fentanyl, which is a synthetic form of heroin that is gripping our communities--and the funding increase was made as a commitment by the Senate Appropriations Committee on a bipartisan basis to have a 93-percent increase in funding as compared to this year. This year we also saw an increase in funding. Thanks to the leadership of some of the Members in this body, we increased the funding for this year, and we have increased it again for next year. That is the good news, but we have to be sure the money is properly spent. That is what CARA is about. It is an authorization bill, and it says that going forward, let's be sure we are spending it on evidence-based treatment and recovery that actually works to make a difference to get people back on track; let's be sure we are spending it on the kinds of things that keep people from getting into the funnel of addiction in the first place--again, evidence-based prevention and education; let's be sure we are helping our law enforcement and helping our health officials. The reason the Fraternal Order of Police strongly supports this legislation is it helps them in training how to use naloxone and Narcan more effectively and provides them the ability to have that to be able to take these overdose increases we have seen in all of our States--be able to save lives. So this legislation is comprehensive. It is needed. We now have the funding in place. Should there be more funding? Yes, I think so. But this is an awfully good start, to have a 93-percent increase and an increase already for this year. There is no excuse for us not getting this conference committee completed and taking the comprehensive Senate bill and merging it with the individual House bills and getting it to the President's desk for his signature. The comprehensive approach is the only way to do this. The acting U.S. attorney for Northern Ohio said it well. Her name is Carole Rendon. She is involved with it, folks. She is in the trenches. She said: ``The only way we can stem this tide is with a comprehensive approach.'' I couldn't agree more. A lot of us, including my friends and allies on the outside, are interested in this issue. There are 130 national groups who have supported this legislation. Virtually every group in the country involved in prevention, education, treatment, recovery, and law enforcement has supported this. But they are concerned about the House versions--the 18 separate bills versus the comprehensive bill--because the House versions do not deal effectively with this issue of recovery. Treatment and recovery need to go hand in hand. By the way, without recovery, the legislation is not comprehensive. It is called the Comprehensive Addiction and Recovery Act for a reason. We know that funding the right kinds of recovery programs will work to help people get back on track and bring their families back together and keep them away from some of the aspects we all know about. The No. 1 cause of accidental death in the State of Ohio is overdoses. It is probably the No. 1 cause of accidental death in the country, from the data we recently received. We have to be sure that recovery works. CARA offers critical resources to develop recovery support services for individuals and families working to overcome addiction. It promotes recovery programs in high schools and colleges that, sadly, are needed. At Ohio State University, we happen to have a model recovery program. Sarah Nerad, who is a brave young woman, started it. It is something other schools are now emulating. It started with a couple of people, and it has grown and grown in Ohio State. Recovering addicts can come together and talk among themselves in a support group. These are college students. This is something that has been very helpful at the college and high school level because it is needed. There are some good ideas in the 18 bills passed by the House that were not in CARA, and we should incorporate those. One I like particularly is lifting the cap on Suboxone so we can expand the number of patients who can be treated by a doctor for an opioid dependency. Suboxone, like methadone, is one of the treatment methods that are used. That cap should be raised. There seems to be a bipartisan consensus about that. I am hopeful that we can quickly resolve the differences we have between the House and Senate bills, pick up the good parts of the House bill, keep it comprehensive, and get it to the President's desk for his signature. I am encouraged that the conference is getting going. Last week I thanked Senator McConnell, the majority leader, for naming the conferees on the Senate side. There has already been a lot of good work done, and now we have the conferees officially named on both sides. Again, there is no excuse for not moving forward. I was very concerned yesterday when I heard a news report from National Public Radio about a White House meeting with some Democratic Members of Congress about potentially stalling CARA, the Comprehensive Addiction and Recovery Act. One White House legislative aide is quoted in the story as saying, ``We need to slow down the conference enough so that the White House . . . can bring it back to the American people. . . . We need . . . help in slowing it down.'' The piece went on to say that some of the Democratic Members who went down to the White House ``were eager to help'' to slow it down. I hope that is not accurate. I can't believe it would be. Delaying might be a good way to score some political points, but it is terrible policy. It is the wrong thing to do, and it is a disservice to the millions of Americans who are suffering across this country from the consequences of addiction and who are waiting for relief. They have been patient so far, but these 130 groups I talked about are getting increasingly impatient, and I don't blame them. I am too. This bill is about saving lives. Delay means the status quo continues. On average, 129 Americans lose their lives every day. We had 129 families come to the Capitol a few weeks ago to make that point--the CARA family group--to be able to let Members know this is something we need to act on now. Every day five Ohioans, on average, lose their lives. That is one every 12 minutes at the national level. In the 103 days since we passed CARA in this Chamber with a 94-to-1 vote, during those 103 days, that means 12,000 Americans have lost their lives to overdoses from heroin and prescription drugs. Again, the overdoses don't tell the story. As horrific as that is, it is a much bigger story. It is about all the casualties--people who may not have overdosed and died, but they are casualties. They have been torn apart from their families. They have been torn apart from their work. They have been driven to crime, such as theft, to support their habit. They do feel as though there is no hope for them. Nine out of ten people who are addicted are not getting treatment. This is happening right now. The price of delay is those people are not getting the help they need. The longer we delay, the longer this epidemic continues to get worse. Maybe some of those who want to delay CARA don't realize how urgent this crisis is. I know there is a lot going on right now, and maybe they are distracted by other issues. Maybe they don't know the statistics. Maybe they don't know the stories of the families broken up, the lives cut short, or those who are casualties to this. Maybe they don't know the faces behind these statistics. Again, just since last week when I spoke last time, we have new information that is troubling. We know now that the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention is warning that the heroin epidemic is actually driving the threat of HIV and hepatitis C, including in my own area of Southwest Ohio. We now know that. So this is about heroin and prescription drugs, but it is also about hepatitis C, and it is also about HIV. Maybe they don't know about the drug traffickers sentenced last week in Lima, OH, for trafficking $300,000 worth of heroin and 20,000 injections' worth of heroin. Maybe they don't know about Stosh Simcak of Euclid, OH, outside Cleveland. He was a star athlete in soccer and football. He was a charismatic, talented, and joyful young man. In high school, he started to experiment with drugs. He started with marijuana and ecstasy and prescription pain killers. He got addicted to opioids and then turned to heroin because it is less expensive and more available. His relationship with his family suffered, of course, as it almost always does. The drug becomes everything. At times, his relationship was broken altogether. He had a hard time getting a job and keeping a full- time job. Finally, he agreed he needed help. His parents unsuccessfully tried to get him into five different rehabilitation centers. Often there was no room. He was arrested with a felony drug charge. He posted bond and was released. He told his dad Steve in a text message: I don't want to lose my family. I lost enough already. . . . I want to be the son you can be proud of if it's not too late. That was the last time Steve ever heard from his son. Within 48 hours, he died of an overdose. Maybe those who support delaying CARA don't know about Dan Durbin from Delphos, OH. It is a small town. He reports setting up on the front lawn for his daughter's high school graduation party recently and seeing in the alley right next door a heroin deal taking place in front of these high school students. I know it is an even-numbered year, meaning it is an election year. There is always another election. But delaying CARA is unacceptable. Partisanship is not going to help people who are suffering to find treatment. It is not going to heal our families. It is not going to educate our kids so they don't become addicted. If we want to show the American people we can accomplish something that really makes our communities better, we will get CARA to the President as soon as possible. We have kept this legislation completely nonpartisan, not just partisan. We brought in major experts from around the country. We had five conferences over a 3-year period. We gathered ideas from Democrats and Republicans. If anyone had a good idea, we didn't ask where it came from. We asked if it was a good idea, if it would help to address this problem. That is the way things are supposed to work. We had strong help from the White House Director of National Drug Control Policy, Michael Botticelli, who has stated repeatedly we need a comprehensive solution and was quoted as saying: There is clear evidence that a comprehensive response looking at multidimensional aspects of this that are embedded in CARA are tremendously important. . . . We know that we need to do more, and I think all of those components put forward in CARA are critically important to make headway in terms of this epidemic. That is the White House drug czar. I hope the White House staffer who was quoted as saying ``Let's delay'' actually talks to the drug czar. Nearly every Democrat in this Chamber voted in support of CARA, and I commend them for that. Democrats were indispensable in crafting it. They were involved at the very start. Sheldon Whitehouse is the coauthor of this legislation with me. He has a real passion for this. He has a heart for it. He understands the pain these families who lost a loved one feel. He understands the casualties of this epidemic. He gets it. Amy Klobuchar has also been very involved, Kelly Ayotte on our side, and others. This has been something from the start--again, not just partisan but nonpartisan. It has been a group effort. That is one reason I think we have received so much good support because we came up with the right ideas. These groups around the country who worked for us on that realize it is going to make a difference. I have been involved with this issue of drug abuse and addiction for more than two decades. Twenty-two years ago, a mom came to my office and said her son had just died of an overdose. What was I doing? That got me engaged. I am the author of the Drug-Free Communities Act, the Drug-Free Media Campaign Act, and the Drug-Free Workplace Act. In this Chamber I have been the author of other legislation, including with Dianne Feinstein, to stop these synthetic drugs and to make sure they are scheduled as illegal drugs. In terms of prescription drug monitoring, we have tried to help pass legislation on interstate prescription drug monitoring. But this legislation, this CARA legislation, is what is needed now. There is no good reason to keep these families who are affected waiting. We can have a conversation about funding. Again, I am for more funding. I have voted that way. This 93-percent increase in funding this year and in the next appropriations bill for next year is a great step forward. Respectfully, let me just say again that this issue is not like everything else we face around here. This is urgent. We have to move, and we have to move now. Will it solve the problem? No. The problem is not going to be solved from Washington, but Washington can be a better partner in addressing the issue right now, and it is a growing issue. Whether I am in a suburb, a rural area, or the inner city in Ohio--no matter where I am, I hear from people about this issue. I have a tele- townhall tonight. I will hear about it. A few weeks ago in our tele-townhall, a gentleman called in and wanted to talk about the treatment options in CARA. He seemed to know a lot about it. I asked him why he knew so much about this, if he wouldn't mind talking about it, reminding him there were probably 25,000 people on the call at the time and that he was being heard by a lot of people. He told his story, which unfortunately was a story you hear way too commonly in my State of Ohio. His daughter--in and out of treatment and, in her case, in and out of the criminal justice system-- had decided to seek treatment. She went, she couldn't get in, and 14 days later she died of an overdose. According to one poll, 3 in 10 Ohioans know someone who is struggling with an opioid addiction. Family members, friends, coworkers, fellow parishioners, their neighbors--those family members are hurting too. It is almost unbearable to watch a loved one suffer through this disease, and it is a disease in that it requires treatment. Ohioans are taking action--and appropriate action too. I commend them for that. In Warren, OH, the Braking Point Recovery Center recently held its annual Walk Against Heroin. Nicholas Story and Emily Smith, who are in recovery from addiction, bravely spoke at that rally about their experiences and how this epidemic is affecting them. Nicholas spoke about how much happier he is now that he is in recovery, saying: ``My life has improved so much it is amazing.'' Emily talked about how her mother, some of her cousins, and friends have suffered from addiction. Some have died of overdoses. I commend them for having the courage to speak up and to spread awareness about this epidemic. Raymond Sansota of Euclid, OH, also spoke about losing his son, Josh, to a heroin addiction. He was a star athlete, played point guard, and was a 4-year letterman in high school. He was an acolyte in his Catholic parish. He was known for his sense of humor, for his musical and artistic talents. He had a good job at a rubber company in Middlefield, OH, but he became addicted to prescription drug painkillers. Eventually, like so many others, he switched to the less expensive, more accessible option, which was heroin. He overdosed at the age of 31. Raymond, thank you for speaking up. At Barnesville High School in Barnesville, OH, OhioHealth Services, Barnesville Hospital, and Crossroads Counseling Services held a townhall about the heroin epidemic, bringing together doctors, lawyers, law enforcement, and public health officials. Judge Frank Fregiato spoke there, and he said: ``Rich, poor, black, white, educated, non-educated, political, nonpolitical, whatever you are, your family is at risk.'' He is right. That is why we can't afford to delay. Today I was talking to two high school principals who came to me at our weekly coffee in Ohio. They informed me they had lost six of their recent graduates to this issue and that they are holding a townhall on this subject soon at that high school. On Saturday, in Stark County, dozens of motorcyclists participated in the second annual Families Against The Heroin Epidemic Rally in Stark. Families Against The Heroin Epidemic Rally is also F.A.T.H.E.R.S.; F.A.T.H.E.R.S. is the acronym. These fathers and those who support them raised money for addiction treatment, for treatment for education, and for law enforcement. I thank everyone who participated in this motorcycle ride and everyone who is doing their part to stop this epidemic. That event was founded by Larry and Kara Vogt of Perry Township. Their sons had recovered from a heroin addiction, and he is in transitional housing. As Larry puts it: ``If you aren't affected by this now, you will be.'' I know the scope of this epidemic can sometimes feel overwhelming, but there is hope. There are many stories of people who have found themselves in the funnel of this addiction, the grip of this addiction, and have found hope through treatment and recovery. There are many who are now helping others to get treatment. Michael Evans of Columbus, OH, is an example of that. He had chronic back pain. He had Percocet and OxyContin and became addicted. Now he is helping others. He has been clean and sober for more than a year. He is beating it because he got treatment. Again, it is time for us to act. Again, I have told stories just from the last week of what is happening around the country and in my home State of Ohio. There is no excuse. We need to act quickly to find common ground, to get a comprehensive bill to the President so it can start to help those millions who are struggling. Delay is not an option. I yield back the remainder of my time.

Mr. PORTMAN. Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that the order for the quorum call be rescinded.

Mr. PORTMAN

Mr. PORTMAN. Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that the resolution be agreed to, the preamble be agreed to, and the motions to reconsider be considered made and laid upon the table with no intervening action or debate.

Mr. PORTMAN. Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that the Senate proceed to the consideration of S. Res. 502, submitted earlier today.

Mr. PORTMAN

Mr. PORTMAN. Mr. President, if there is no further business to come before the Senate, I ask unanimous consent that it stand adjourned under the previous order.

Mr. PORTMAN

Mr. PORTMAN. Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that when the Senate completes its business today, it adjourn until 10 a.m., Tuesday, June 21; that following the prayer and pledge, the morning hour be deemed expired, the Journal of proceedings be approved to date, and the time for the two leaders be reserved for their use later in the day; further, that following leader remarks, the Senate be in a period of morning business until 12:30 p.m., with Senators permitted to speak therein for up to 10 minutes each; further, that following morning business, the Senate resume consideration of H.R. 2578; further, that the Senate recess from 12:30 p.m. until 2:15 p.m. to allow for the weekly conference meetings; finally, that the filing deadline under rule XXII be at 2:30 p.m., Tuesday.

Mr. PORTMAN

Mr. PORTMAN. Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that the order for the quorum call be rescinded.

Mr. PORTMAN. Mr. President, last night was a big night for Ohio and for the Cleveland Cavaliers in the NBA finals. I have tried not to rub it in today. My colleague Senator Brown and I have been careful not to offend our California colleagues. However, I did wear my Cavaliers tie today. It was a very exciting night for Cleveland. I rise to simply commend the Cavs for an outstanding performance and a really gutsy performance throughout the entire series. This team worked together and they showed that together they could overcome all kinds of obstacles and challenges: Kyrie Irving, Tristan Thompson, Kevin Love, J.R. Smith, Mo Williams, Matthew Dellavedova, Richard Jefferson, Iman Shumpert, Coach Tyronn Lue, and then, of course, the king, LeBron James. It was an amazing performance. There have been a lot of good teams and a lot of great professional sports in Cleveland over the past 50 years, but this is the first championship won by a Cleveland team since 1964 and first ever for the Cavaliers so this is a big deal in Cleveland. We are very excited about it. During that long drought, it would have been tempting to go give up, but Cleveland fans never did. They never do. Cleveland is ``Believeland,'' as it has been called recently, and now it is the comeback city. It was not an easy series. It followed a tough year last year. We had a lot of injuries last year, which hammered our ability to be competitive in the finals, and we changed coaches in the middle of the season. We were trailing three games to one. I went to the game a week ago Friday when we lost in Cleveland and went out West. It was a tough situation. Being down 3 to 1 in NBA finals means you usually lose. In fact, no one had ever won being down 3 to 1. But the Cavs aren't just any team; they overcame the odds and showed real grit and persistence, determination, and perseverance. And that is more than just basketball; that embraces and embodies the spirit of Cleveland, and it is a lesson for all of us. LeBron James put it well when he said: In northeast Ohio, nothing is given. Everything is earned. You work for what you have. And the Cavs certainly earned it. They worked hard for it, and they deserve it. It was fitting that the win was sealed by LeBron James, a proud son of Akron, OH, a graduate of St. Vincent-St. Mary High School, and the unanimously chosen NBA Finals MVP who, by the way, led all players on both teams in the series in every single major statistical category. So in points scored, in rebounds and assists, steals and blocks, he led everyone. We are told this is the first time anyone has ever done that, by the way, in any series. Extraordinary. LeBron scored or assisted on half of the Cavs' points in the finals. He became the third player in NBA history to achieve a triple-double in game 7 of the finals. He almost averaged a triple-double. Over the course of the series, he scored, on average, 29 points, 11 rebounds, and 8.9 assists per game. His mission to bring this championship to Cleveland is now complete. He came home to Ohio for the same reason so many Ohioans come back or stay in Ohio: That is where he wanted to raise his family, and I commend him for that and also the fact that he really wanted to bring this championship back home. When he announced his return to Cleveland, he said, ``Before anyone ever cared where I would play basketball, I was just a kid from Northeast Ohio.'' Of course, I want to congratulate Golden State on a historic season, and I want to offer my condolences to my friends and colleagues, Senators Feinstein and Boxer. Senator Feinstein and I made a friendly wager on this. Tomorrow, since the Cavs have won, she will be giving me a case of California wine, and I am pleased I get to keep the case of Great Lakes beer that I had bought for her. Congratulations to general manager David Griffin, who made a lot of difficult decisions and took the risks necessary in putting together a championship team. Congratulations to the owner, Dan Gilbert. This is a guy whose strong and consistent support of Cleveland, both on the court and off the court, is paying off for Cleveland, and we appreciate him--and, of course, for his helping to be sure LeBron James came back. Congratulations, above all, to Believeland--to Cleveland--and to an incredible championship run here. Mr. President, I am all in for the Cavs. I yield back. I suggest the absence of a quorum.