Ahead of vote, Portman urges colleagues to join fight against drug addiction

Ahead of a vote on his bill to address the heroin epidemic in Ohio, U.S. Senator Rob Portman went to the Senate floor to urge his colleagues to support his Comprehensive Addiction and Recovery Act.

Portman outlined the severity of this epidemic in Ohio and shared what he is hearing from Ohioans struggling with addiction. The Senate Judiciary Committee is expected to vote on Portman’s bill tomorrow.
 
Excerpts are Portman’s remarks are below.

 

[[In-content Ad]]“The legislation is called the Comprehensive Addiction and Recovery Act, or CARA. It focuses on several areas. One is prevention and education to try to keep people from making the wrong decision and going down the road to addiction. But another is to encourage states and provide incentives to local governments and nonprofits to use evidence-based treatment and recovery that has been proven to work to try to deal with this epidemic.
 
“Today we have, unfortunately, higher levels of death from overdoses, drug overdoses, than we do any other accidental cause of death. More than car accidents, for instance.
 
“In my own home state of Ohio, this has been true for the last couple of years. We lost over 2,400 Ohioans last year to drug overdoses. Part of our legislation also addresses this issue very directly by providing our law enforcement and other first responders, firefighters, EMS, with Narcan, which is a drug, really a miracle drug to bring people back if they have had an overdose – also known as nalaxone.”