[Congressional Record Volume 163, Number 166 (Monday, October 16, 2017)]
[Senate]
[Pages S6390-S6391]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]



                        Nomination of Tom Marino

  Mr. BROWN. Mr. President, the addiction epidemic is a national 
emergency that takes far too many lives and destroys too many families 
across the country. Unfortunately, my State, in some ways, leads the 
way. Four thousand Ohioans died from drug overdoses last year, more 
than any State in the United States. Four thousand families lost a 
mother, a father, a daughter, a son, a sister, or brother.
  We need to treat this epidemic like the public health emergency it 
is. We asked the President to proclaim it a public health emergency. He 
talked about it but still hasn't done it.
  That is the same reason I can't support Representative Tom Marino's 
nomination to head our country's drug control policy. First of all, 
fundamentally, I don't want an elected official, a politician, in that 
position. I want somebody from the treatment community. Congressman 
Marino is a nominee who, in his time in Congress, showed he was too 
cozy with the drug companies that helped create this epidemic.
  Earlier today, President Trump responded to reports about Congressman 
Marino and said he is looking at those reports very closely. I hope he 
does. I hope he withdraws that nomination. Make no mistake, Congressman 
Marino does not want to take us in the right direction in this fight.
  Today I was in Austintown--a township on the edge of Youngstown, in 
Mahoning County--talking to Officer Toth and Chief Gavalier at the 
Austintown Police Department about the opioid crisis. It is coming up 
on Drug Take Back Day, where on Saturday all over the country, the DEA 
is asking police departments to allow people to bring their unused 
drugs in to get them out of the medicine cabinets. We were talking 
about much more than that. We were talking about how State governments 
and the Federal Government haven't stepped up the way we should to 
partner on prevention and education in medication-assisted therapy 
treatment and all the things we should be doing.
  Mr. Marino seems to think we arrest our way out of this problem, but 
that is not what law enforcement officials across this country are 
saying. Detective Toth and I didn't talk about arresting people's 
children and arresting parents. We talked about how to promote the 
Department's Drug Take Back Day.
  Addiction isn't an individual problem or a character flaw; it is a 
chronic disease. We need someone running our drug policy who 
understands that, not someone who simply wants to pull patients out of 
treatment in the middle of an epidemic. We know what that was about 
when on this floor, not much more than a month ago, only by one vote 
were we able to preserve the treatment that so many opioid-addicted 
people are getting. Right now, in my State, 200,000 Ohioans are getting 
opioid treatment because they have insurance under the Affordable Care 
Act.
  We need the enforcement piece. That is why I have introduced the 
bipartisan INTERDICT Act and why I have worked with Senator Portman on 
this to make sure we have resources for Customs and Border Protection 
agents to screen packages effectively and safely before they reach our 
neighborhood.
  It has been more than 8 weeks since President Trump promised a 
national disaster declaration. We have yet to see a strategy from the 
White House. Other than a nominee who thinks one locks people up to 
defeat the opioid epidemic, we have seen no strategy from the White 
House to deal with the epidemic. Ohio families cannot afford to wait.

  Let me close with this. A few months ago, I was in Cincinnati, at the 
Talbert House, and I met with a father who was there with his 30-year-
old daughter. He told me that his daughter would not be there right 
now, that she would not still be alive, if it were not for Medicaid and 
the treatment for addiction that she received because of it.
  We know what we have to do to deal with this epidemic. I ask the 
President to do the right thing, and I ask the Senate to do the right 
thing and move forward. It is the biggest public health emergency in 
our lifetimes. We need the people who are in charge of our drug control 
policy to treat it that way.
  I yield the floor.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER. The Senator from Rhode Island.
  Mr. WHITEHOUSE. Mr. President, let me echo the remarks of the senior 
Senator from Ohio.
  Like Ohio, Rhode Island has a very significant opioid problem, and we 
came together in this Chamber to support the Comprehensive Addiction 
and Recovery Act. I had the privilege of being the principal Democratic 
author of that piece of legislation, and Senator Portman of Ohio was 
the principal Republican author of that legislation. We worked for 
years to set it up--to hold the hearings necessary, to get the 
information together, to make it work. When we did, it passed this body 
with a massive bipartisan expression of support.
  It makes no sense to nominate somebody to this position who does not 
understand what we understand, which is

[[Page S6391]]

that the drug epidemic is, at its heart, a public health emergency and 
an illness. A reversion to law enforcement harshness in dealing with 
this problem will simply not be effective.