This is about 2. 5 hours. Bloomberg school of Public Health and baltimore. This is about two hours. Andadies and gentlemen, online viewers around the world, good morning and welcome. I am alan mckenzie, dean of the Johns HopkinsBloomberg School of Public Health and i would like to stand by extending our special welcome to the president of clinton who you will hear from in just a few minutes. Also joining us today are several policymakers. They include congressman cummings. They will be joining us in the program to rip an audience are maryland delegate Antonio Hayes and senator ben carsons office. Finally, i would like to extend an especially warm welcome to senator murkowski who we are now proud to call [applause] who we are proud to call one of our own. Thank you so much for being here. We are indeed honored to be working with the Clinton Foundation to bring you todays summit on one of our most important locales problems americas Opioid Epidemic. It is a National Crisis which demands involvement from all levels of government, public and private organizations as well as individual citizens. Die from. , every day, overdose. Few years, the death rate has tripled and the causes or complex. Noncancerth chronic pain or prescribed opioids instead of safer, less addictive alternatives. Heroin is more available and increasingly adulterated with fentanyl. Too two many people few people have access to evidencebased addiction treatment. The Bloomberg School leadership in preventing and treating Substance Abuse stretches back nearly 50 years. We funded the nations first graduate Training Program for drug and alcohol counseling and ever get it for the adoption of methadone in federally funded Treatment Programs. That leadership has since in cemented in the founding of two centers. For injury prevention and control, and the other for drug safety. Our collaboration with the Clinton Foundation to address though. 2014 ton in may address the opioid crisis, began in may 2014. We focused on the rising rates of injuries and death from opioid. We United National leader from academia, government and the private sector, paving the way for a yearlong effort to identify best practices. This initial engagement in 2015, the Bloomberg School and the Clinton Foundation produced a document that identified a path forward and framed the problem as a severe Public Health issue, calling for scaling out existing evidencebased prevention to prevent future loss of life. Despite such efforts however, we still have a long way to go. An alltimes reach high in 2016 and the numbers keep rising. Despite recent announcements by the white house, our country has not yet embraced and addressed a real need for urgent action and a true of. Commitment of resources. Byew report just released the Bloomberg School and the Clinton Foundation, entitled the Opioid Epidemic, from describedo impact pillars to combat the Opioid Epidemic including optimizing Prescription Drug treatment, monitoring programs, advanced Engineering Solutions as well as combating stigma. These strategies work, they have been shown to work. Today, you will hear from from experts and advocates working on the epidemic by further implementing and developing these strategies and generating new evidence. But we need your help. Please, let us Work Together to stop the deadly epidemic. Introduceed now to congressman Elijah Cummings. Born and raised in baltimore, congressman cummings has represented maryland seventh Congressional District since 1996 and is now the ranking minority member on the House Committee of government oversight and reform and serves on the task force of health care reform. As cofounder and chair of the congressional caucus on drug policy, he has helped to shape the National Policy on drug addiction and access to affordable medication. Please join me to give a warm welcome to congressman elation cummings. [applause] rep. Cummings good morning everyone. Come on, we can do better than that, good morning everyone. Morning ] rep. Cummings it is my honor and privilege to be here and also thanks to the dean for your kind words but more important thank you for your time. I have to do do this. On behalf of my family and certainly on behalf of generations yet unborn thanks to you, Johns Hopkins, for taking good care of me. [applause] having spent two months in hospital just a few blocks from here, after a heart procedure i , must say that i have grown to love john hopkins even more. To the doctors and the cafeteria folks, everybody, associated with this campus, i thank you for changing the trajectory of my destiny. I truly, truly appreciated, thank you. [applause] i truly appreciated. I am honored to join former president clinton and dean mckenzie in welcoming our distinguished panel to this summit on our nations opioid crisis. Certainly always good to see my ood friend, my mentor and i will always call her my senator, senator koski, and i also congressmanhat baines is in the room, we are glad to have you as well. The danger we now face is more virulent more than ever. ,rescription opioids, heroin fentanyl, and other synthetic drugs were involved in more than 60 of overdoses last year which resulted in 64,000 deaths. Let that sink in. 64,000 deaths. Here in maryland, at least 2089 people, fatally overdosed in 2016. 66 in 2015. This is stark evidence of how the dangers and human devastation are expanding exponentially. There is a bipartisan acknowledgment that a national Public Health emergency crisis does exist. But resistance remains. In both the white house and in congress, to taking bold action. Early this year, the president s on Opioid Commission led by governor Chris Christie recommended that the president declare a national emergency. As all of you know, last week, the president declared a Public Health emergency, which is a good first step, but it does not unlock any additional federal funding to confront this crisis had on. Head on. The Commission Also recommended something else, that the president authorized the secretary of hhs to negotiate lower prices for naloxone, the lifesaving drug that reverses overdoses, of opioid and i am sure you will hear a lot more about that from the doctor who has been a staunch advocate of expanding its usage. Right now, our people on the front lines of this epidemic cannot afford to stock up on naloxone. Ledh is why last month, i 50 house members in sending a letter to President Trump asking him to a doctor this recommendation. We begged ask him, him. Unfortunately, the president did not even mention the word his announcement last week. Finally, as you all know the , president and Congressional Republicans have spent years , years, trying to repeal the Affordable Care act, and reversed the medicated tension, even though medicaid provide Treatment Services to three in 10 people who struggle with opioid addiction. If we are going to respond to this epidemic, we need your evidencebased research and your continued active engagement in debate. Ic we must encourage the president commissions own recommendation to expand the availability of naloxone and reduce the cost. We must press Insurance Companies to eliminate the opioidbasedvor of in killers and we must challenge our friends in congress to expand publichealth funding, preserve medicare and safeguard medicaid. Finally, let me say this, you already know that our sponsor to this publichealth crisis is a test for our community. It is also a test for the entire society. My good friend from maryland, congressman john delaney, has expressed that applies directly to this crisis. Expressions those they hear something and, i wish i had come up with that. T is so, true i think about this all the time, these words, because there are so true. He says, the cost of doing nothing, is not nothing. Tweet that. [laughter] of doing nothing is not nothing. Let me repeat it. The cost of doing nothing is not nothing. Repeated over and over again. So, ladies and gentlemen, i thank all of you for being here today. We are an army and we will going to fight and we will overcome. Thank you very much. [applause] host thank you very much, lessessman coming congressman cummings on your leadership on this issue and those inspiring words for us today. I am thrilled to introduce and welcome back to our School President bill clinton, founder and for chair of the Clinton Foundation and former president 42nd president of the United States and former chair of the Clinton Foundation. After leaving the white house in 2001, president clinton established the Clinton Foundation to build more resilient communities by improving Global Health strengthening local communities, and protecting the environment. In 2002, he launched the Foundations Initiative to negotiate prices for hiv and aids medication to extend access to 11. 5 Million People in over 70 countries. An achievement many thought was impossible. Using a similar strategy, president clinton negotiated National Partnerships with two pharmaceutical companies to provide a predictable, affordable supply of naloxone to community groups, Public Safety organizations, and schools and universities. His goal, to cut Prescription Drug abuse deaths in half over the next five years, saving approximately 10,000 lives. This could be done through Strategic Partnerships that raise consumer and Public Awareness, advanced business practice chains, and change and very importantly, mobilize communities. Please join me and giving a warm welcome to president bill clinton. [applause] pres. Clinton thank you very much. Thank you. Thank you very much. First of all, dean mckenzie, thank you for having us back at the Bloomberg School for Public Health and for the Ongoing Partnership we have had in confronting the Opioid Epidemic. I want to thank congressman cummings for his remarks and his leadership on this and many other issues. He said senator mikulski was his role model and he certainly proved it the last couple of years. Barbara was on a short list we when barbara was a senator verymaryland, she was in a short list that we kept at the white house, it was called the just say yes list. [laughter] because when she asked for something you knew sooner or , later, you were going to cave in because she was like a dog writing your leg, you know . [laughter] time, wee a lot of would just say yes, and we could all go back to work. [laughter] i am glad to see her here teaching. To d like to say yes and thanks to two other people. One is Mike Bloomberg for funding this effort. He has got a lot of money, i know, but he could have done other things with it. He was a great Public Health mayor of new york and this is a great school. The other person i want to thank with our foundation, who is not here, is my daughter, chelsea who teaches Public Health in , columbia and is my family in anythingee expert on regarding Public Health policy. She urged me for years to get involved in this one most people were not paying any attention to it. I would like to thank was we all of you for being here and agreeing to take action. Latest provisional 2016, morehat in than 64,000 people in this country died of drug overdose. Well over half of them were opioidrelated. If this data is confirmed, and we have no reason to believe that it will not be, that means that last year more people died , of opioidrelated drug overdoses than the numbers of deaths from the aids crisis at the peak before it was treated, then from gun related homicides, or from automobile accidents. Opioidrelated deaths are now the leading cause of death for americans under the age of 50. Someoney all of us know , in the family, has lost a loved one. Have five friends who have lost their children. Frome learned a great deal these families. Had a son who was working for hillary when he died , and had worked for me. Programhe law and nba at George Washington university. He was a very smart man but no coulder told him that you stop after five years and taking after five beers and going to sleep, the you cannot wake up. Everybody has got stories like that. And now we know the epidemic has grown like wildfire in small towns and rural areas with no Public Health infrastructure, where people dont know what to do or cant do it if they know. It is not only a human tragedy, the cdc estimates that the cost is more than 78 billion a year, to continue to do so little in such a fractured way on this problem. Costs, criminal justicerelated costs, addiction treatment, lost productivity. Yet, for all the noise made about it, the externa efforts and the genuine legitimate concerns, and the extraordinary efforts being made people with nothing. And i mean i was just in ohio about a year and a half ago, a little town in southwest ohio, and i was very proud of looking at it, because it was totally rebuilt, it was an early 19thcentury town all the beautiful buildings were renovated because of investments secured partly under the investment tax credit, the last completely Bipartisan Initiative i signed to give people who invest in small towns and rural areas with high unemployment income. That was the good news. The good news further was it was that the most beautiful building in town had been given over by the city to doctors who voluntarily came there that they could act as in appalachia. Oh, it was beautiful. There was a doctor born in poland who got her medical degree in new york who was places,n one of those but i walked out and across the street and the woman was waving frantically at me, please come over here. I only hold one asset of any value, a used car. I sold it and rented that office and what your being is only Treatment Facility we have in this town. She did introduce me to a woman whose husband had just died of a heroin overdose. The poor mans version of opioid addiction as we travel down, and three women who are recovering heroin addicts. And she said, look, i am happy to do this. I know nothing about it. I get whatever help i can, and it is all we got. I am glad that one of our panelists is the head of Public Health in baltimore, which had the first Public Health program of any city in the United States, going back to the late 18th century. Though, Community Health networks have been allowed to atrophy, or never expanded to embrace this mission. This is like a good newsbad news story to me. The good news is that it is the first drug epidemic where we act like a grownup country and treat it like a Public Health problem instead of a criminal justice problem. [applause] pres. Clinton it is a good thing. Some cynics have said that it is because it started in a small wentof worldwide people, into epidemic phases before it spread to the cities. There might be something to that but i think the more likely , explanation is that this is the first epidemic we have had killing this many people that had a nonviolent delivery chain. The problem is, as well know, the more we get into cheap mexico,grown in andested by farmers, fentanyl, the more likely we are to see more violent Delivery Systems as people fight over turf for guaranteed money. Thiss coming to them movie is coming to a theater near you, whoever you are whatever your color is, whatever , your politics are. And that brings me to the bad news. It is a Public Health problem and we recognize it. Good for us. We are growing up as a country we are seeing all of these people as people. The bad news is there is a , woefully inadequate Public Health response that is not harper lee coordinated with Law Enforcement, with the treatment committee, with insurers, with