The Democrats failed to win the Senate's vote for adding $600 million for the full-blown implementation of Comprehensive Addiction and Recovery Act (CARA).
The bill was strongly opposed by the Republicans due to the breaching of the budget limits to provide its funding. However, they counter-proposed that the bill can wait until next year's round of regular spending bills.
The bill was carried twice by President Barack Obama, including Rob Portman of Ohio, Kelly Ayotte of New Hampshire, Jeanne Shaheen of Missouri, Sherrod Brown of Cleveland and Mark Kirk of Illinois. Each requested for an immediate funding.
The emergency funds were designed to give $300 million for the substance abuse prevention and treatment block grants in different states, $50 million for the Center for Disease Control and Prevention's work on prescription drug monitoring programs and other community health system projects, and another $10 million for the improvement of the easy access in high-risk neighborhoods to medication-assisted treatment services for heroin and prescription opioids.
However, Senator Rob Portman, one of the authors of the bill, said he will promote treatment alternatives and reverse overdoses, helps veterans, and helps women and babies.
"I will support efforts to add additional resources over and above what could be spent this year on CARA because I believe this is such an urgent problem, and I believe that it does rise to that level of being an emergency," Portman said in his floor speech.
Through Congress' help, CARA will address drug abuse by improving prescription monitoring programs, shift resources from incarceration to treatment of drug offenders and expand the availability of naloxone, which can counter the effects of overdoses.
Moreover, Portman emphasized that it will create a pilot program for state substance abuse agencies, that allows funds to be used to target women who are addicted to opiates and provide family-based services women in non-residential settings.
Another Democrat Senator, Jeanne Shaheen, stated that CARA will help fight the heroin and opioid epidemic in the longer term.
"I urge my colleagues to also support this amendment because it will provide urgent emergency funding to ramp up this fight in the months immediately ahead. This is a nationwide crisis. It's time to mobilize a nationwide response that is equal to the challenge," the Senator opined.
Senator Sherrod Brown of Cleveland, also a supporter of the bill, said that the federal legislation will treat opioid addiction as a multifaceted problem and includes prevention, crisis response, increased access to treatment and long-term recovery support.
Senator Kelly Ayotte, a Republican Senator, shared a personal story of a New Hampshire resident struggling with addiction during her floor speech, including a woman she identified as Angela from Nashua.
"Angela lost her mother to a heroin overdose 17 years ago, has adopted the children of several of her aunts and uncles who have lost their battles with addiction."
Ayotte continued, "After all this, Angela's son and his girlfriend have become addicted to opioids and his girlfriend overdosed in Angela's home. Her son is still battling with heroin addiction."
She concluded that the bill will make a difference, and will help save lives in New Hampshire and across the country, and no doubt that passing the bill will make a difference
"We will all need to continue to do more. We will all need to continue to fight for more and more support through the appropriations process in any way that we can, and I intend to keep up this fight because I know that lives are on the line," she stated it with conviction.
Statistics provide that there are more than 100 Americans dying from overdose every day. Nearly 2,500 Ohioans died in 2014 from accidental overdoses, an 18 percent rise from the previous year. It included a record number of heroin deaths, which rose from 986 in 2013 to 1,177 in 2014.
