Opening Statement of Councilmember David Grosso

Committees on Health and Judiciary & Public Safety Joint Public Oversight Roundtable on
The District Government’s Strategy and Actions to Combat the Opioid
Epidemic
January 28, 2019

Thank you, Chairman Gray and Chairman Allen, for convening this important hearing today.

As a city we have come to understand that the challenges of drug use and addiction are about
public health and not about locking people up—we should be responding to drug abuse with
treatment, not handcuffs and jail cells.

Yet too often people who are struggling with addiction cannot get the help they need.

The Council took action to improve this situation last year by passing the Opioid Use Disorder
Treatment and Safe Access Amendment Act of 2018, and the Mayor finally published a plan
last month for tackling the opioid overdose crisis we are facing.

But it is a disgrace that it took over two years for the executive branch to formulate that plan,
while District of Columbia residents were dying by the hundreds.

Many of the proposals included in the Mayor’s plan were on the table two years ago, if not
earlier.

People on the front lines of the epidemic and in this Council were sounding the alarm over the
past few years about the number of deaths and the lack of action to prevent them, from
inefficient distribution of Narcan to a shortage of treatment spots.

When myself and others put forward innovative ideas drawing on evidence and best practices
in other jurisdictions, the executive ignored them or outright opposed them.

Thankfully the Mayor has made an about face and now supports the bill written by Mr. Gray to
equip MPD officers with Narcan.
I wrote to the Director of the Department of Health about exploring safe injection sites in 2017,
and I believe that Dr. Nesbitt went to visit one, but then we heard nothing more.

Meanwhile, we continue to face dual HIV and Hepatitis C epidemics, even as our
evidence-based needle exchange programs have dramatically reduced new HIV infections
since we were freed from Congress’ prohibition of these life-saving activities.

Yet the executive took a stance against my proposal to decriminalize possession of drug
paraphernalia for personal use, which is another forward thinking approach that is backed up
by evidence, and we should be pursuing it.

Lastly, I want to emphasize that we must also understand opioid overdose deaths within a
broader context of D.C.’s response to substance abuse disorder, and the serious missteps on
that front by the Department of Behavioral Health and other agencies over the past few years.

A number of prominent core service agencies that offered substance abuse services closed
over the past few years, and there seem to be no urgency to fill the gap.

There was also the ineptitude shown by the agency in 2017 when it abruptly stopped payments
for hundreds of residents receiving medication assisted treatment, causing the Committee on
Health to intervene.

While the executive branch fails to take action on these life-threatening situations, somehow
the Mayor’s agencies find time to crack down on D.C. employees who are participating in the
medical marijuana program, threatening their jobs, despite the research showing that medical
marijuana helps reduce opioid dependence.

I hope that today we can get some answers, find a way forward, and save lives. Unfortunately,
for the over 300 people who died of opioid overdoses over the past two years, it is too late.

Thank you.

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