This year, over 100,000 Americans died from overdose deaths. Annual deaths were 50% higher in 2021 versus data from 2019, according to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). Kentucky experienced an increase of 54%. I’m working to improve resources for both rehabilitation and enforcement.

Rehabilitation:

• I helped deliver an $87 million federal grant to the University of Kentucky to support UK’s HEALing Communities research. The goal of this project is to reduce opioid fatalities by 40% in three years in sixteen counties across the Commonwealth. Some of these counties include Sixth District counties such as Bourbon, Fayette, Jessamine, Clark and Madison.
• I led the effort in Congress to establish the Recovery Housing Program, a new federal grant program through the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD). This grant program was created as part of the CAREER Act that I led to passage in Congress by including the legislation in a larger package to address opioids—the SUPPORT for Patients and Communities Act.
• In December of 2020, the Commonwealth received a $1.1 million federal grant from the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) Recovery Housing Program.
• The Isaiah House Treatment Center also received a $2.4 million federal grant through CAREER Act funding in August of 2021. This grant will allow the Center to service 6,000 Kentuckians over the next five years.

Enforcement:

• Since entering Congress, I successfully pushed for multiple Sixth District counties to be designated High Intensity Drug Trafficking Areas (HIDTA) counties. This designation allocated additional federal resources to strengthen the partnership between federal, state and local collaboration to halt drug trafficking and prosecute other drug crimes. These counties in the Sixth District are HIDTA designated: Madison, Montgomery, Powell and Clark County.
• In 2021, enough fentanyl poured through our southern border to kill every man, woman and child in the United States seven times over again. That is just the fentanyl that we know about. We must secure our southern border and stop the flow of deadly fentanyl that makes every community in America a border community. I’m cosponsoring and have voted for legislation to restart border wall construction, hire new border agents and deploy new technology to secure our southern border and stop this deadly flow of drugs once and for all.