Roy Blunt Quotes

On one hand we encourage and allow major pharmaceutical companies to openly hook vast sectors of our population on narcotics, and then we cut them off and throw them in jail, and moralize about it. It is clearly a huge, huge, and growing problem. It's devastating. We need to treat it as a health crisis, which it is, and stop moralizing.

If you're a first-responder in Missouri as part of a fire department, you're three times more likely to respond to a drug overdose than you are a fire. So it's a problem. I don't know exactly what the right number is, but certainly I think members of the Senate and House are rightly concerned about it.

Probably because I personally knew at least six or seven people in Ross County who died from overdoses in the last three years. The heroin epidemic is just too aggravating and sad and unsettling for even someone like me to live with and think about for the time it would take to write a book dealing with it.

I have always been very interested in the issue of drugs, because as much as illegal drugs are prosecuted, if you think of it as a health issue, the real killer are prescription drugs, like over prescribing of opioids.

We lose thousands of our fellow Americans every year to opioid abuse.

We now have a national security consideration, public health issues, we have an epidemic of heroine overdoses in all places in this country because of the ease of bringing heroine in. We have to secure the border.

The Drug War has arguably been the single most devastating, dysfunctional social policy since slavery.

Mr. Speaker, it is matter of common knowledge that an epidemic of alarming proportions is prevailing throughout the country. Out of an abundant precaution the Senate has ordered the galleries closed, which action, I understand, meets with the approval of the medical authorities, and so I ask unanimous consent that the Speaker be instructed to close the galleries of this House until further action shall be taken by the House.

My home state of Kentucky has been especially hard hit. In 2015, more than 1,300 Kentuckians died after drug overdoses, many with opioids in their system. That's about four per day.

Men, age 25 to 55, the labor-force participation rate is down 10%. That's unbelievable. There are 35,000 dying of opioids every year. Seventy percent of kids age 17 to 24 can't get into the US military because of health or education. Obesity, diabetes, reading and writing. Is that the society we wanted? No. We should be working on these things, acknowledge the flaws we have, and come up with solutions. Not Democrat. Not Republican. Not knee-jerk.

By the year 2025, 500 million people will die of smoking. Now, that's a Vietnam War every day for 27 years. That's the Titanic sinking every 27 minutes for 27 years.

The Force deals a lot with the heroin epidemic, which I'm sorry to know people are experiencing in Canada.

The dramatically different manner in which we, as a nation, responded to the crisis presented by drunk driving and the crisis caused by the emergence of crack cocaine speaks volumes about who we value, and who we view as disposable.

My government will continue mounting a real fight against the trafficking of marijuana and all other drugs.

I've pretty much always used my positions as a bully pulpit. What that means is strongly advocating for the things I feel are really important. Gun violence, to me, is the highest-priority public-health issue, and I have to make sure Congress is aware of it, the American people are aware of it, the president is aware of it, and that we all begin together to develop policies to exterminate the disease - the epidemic, really - of gun violence.

The white horse of heroin will ride you to hell.

Just plain logic says that the war on drugs does not work. It absolutely does not work. We have this highly addictive legal drug called tobacco which has never resulted in people being sent to prison, but there has been a massive reduction in its consumption simply because responsible adults looking at their own bodies have said they don't want to do that to themselves.

The importation and sale of marijuana is condemned and punished as a serious crime, but we accept as legitimate the manufacture and sale of an infinitely more addictive and deadly drug: the nicotine in cigarettes that cost the lives of 390,000 American citizens last year.

We have tax revenue that's going to allow us to look in a much more comprehensive way at intervening in addiction.

Here is the solution to the American drug problem suggested a couple years back by the wife of our President: "Just say no.

I hear heroin is a very popular drug these days.

I don't think that there would be more users if drugs were legalized.

If the principle is, "Let's not get lethal substances out to the public", the first one you'd go after is tobacco. The next one you'd go after is alcohol. Way down the list you'd get to cocaine, and sort of invisibly low you'd get to marijuana.

Disease has always been a much bigger killer of human beings than wars.

I've lost over 800 West Virginians the last year. Lost their lives to opiate and drug addiction. This is something that we've got to fight. We need to have treatment centers that take care of people. We need to start basically education from kindergarten all the way through adulthood. We need to get involved and stop this epidemic that's going on that's just ravaging.