Keating To Speak At National Summit On Drug Abuse

ATLANTA – Cape Cod’s congressman will address the region’s drug epidemic today at a national summit on prescription drug and heroin abuse.

Bourne Democrat William Keating (MA-9) has spoken at the  for the past four years and will speak specifically on the opioid and heroin crisis in Massachusetts.

“Each year that I attend this summit I think about how important the work happening here is, but I also hope that this will be the last year we need to hold an event like this,” said Keating. “My district includes two counties with the highest rates of prescription drug abuse in the Commonwealth. But this is not just a Massachusetts problem.”

“Every single community across the country is affected by prescription drug abuse and more and more communities are seeing an influx of heroin on their streets, in their schools, and eventually in their homes,” Keating added. “We need a unified, national approach to tackle this problem and this Summit is putting all the brightest minds and stakeholders together in a room to do just that.”

President Obama was the keynote speaker at the event Tuesday. The summit is organized by Kentucky Republican Hal Rogers.

Keating filed House bill 4841 last week, called the Co-Prescribing Saves Lives Act of 2016, which would encourage doctors to prescribe narcan with opioid prescriptions to make narcan more readily available. The proposal would also make funding available to allow state health departments to establish guidelines for co-prescribing.