Washington, DC – Senator Sheldon Whitehouse (D-RI), a member of the Senate Budget Committee, released the following statement on the omnibus spending bill announced today, which will keep the federal government funded through September:
“A bipartisan Congress moved beyond the President’s unhelpful rhetoric and reached an important compromise on federal spending. The $2 billion boost for the National Institutes of Health will support Rhode Island researchers working on cutting-edge health science. The $170 million we put toward fighting the opioid epidemic through the bipartisan Comprehensive Addiction and Recovery Act (a law I passed last year) will help us confront the drug crisis that has turned life upside down in communities around Rhode Island. It has been a long fight to put resources behind the CARA law’s important reforms.”
In July, President Obama signed into law Whitehouse’s Comprehensive Addiction and Recovery Act (CARA), which established a range of policies to prevent and treat addiction to opioid drugs, including programs to increase education on drug use, to expand medication-assisted treatment, to improve prescription drug monitoring programs, to support those in recovery, and to promote comprehensive state responses to the opioid crisis.
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