spectrum. we've done a pretty good job on fiber. we have fiber industries getting it out where it needs to be. we could do some work on the infrastructure part, in order to get 5g to the homes the way i've described it, we need to put a lot of different small cells all over the country. once we do that, i think we'll be in in a good position. tim ryan is a co chair of a congressional caucus that deals with addiction treatment and recovery. we'll show as much of the discussion as we can ahead of the live forum on isis, which is scheduled to start at 6:00 eastern.

i'd like to say good morning, because we originally scheduled this for 10:00 a.m. good afternoon, welcome to the national press club. my name is jamie horowitz, i help guide the headliner's committee here at the club. and i want to welcome you here today, i want to welcome our guests. before we get into introductions of our speakers, i haven't done this before for -- i chaired the headliners committee for the past couple years prior to when we made it part of the news maker committee, before we made it the headliners committee, i never really talked about the process of how we select

something to be either a news maker or a headliner. it seems like before we had the hurricanes and earthquakes, the national disaster we were talking about was the opiod crisis. and it wasn't that long ago, but in some ways it seems like a while ago. we thought it would be important, this particular week, when we thought congress would be dealing with the budget, to talk about this, because how can you take on this disaster and -- when there was actually talk that maybe the government would shut down, how would this all work? >> that was our sense when we started this process. and we reached out to the national union of health care workers to try to get front line health care workers, wen watted people that were dealing with the opiod crisis and mental health and we wanted to find someone in congress that could

talk about the other side of the coin, how these things would be funded and what was on the table. it wasn't all that long ago we heard the administration was making cuts to mental health and their proposed budget. little did we expect this week would become a health care week. the panel we put together is an excellent panel to discuss this. we're going to try to take this from birth through later years. our first speaker will be jackie who works with newborn babies and children in oakland who -- i'll let her go into more detail of what she does and where she works she's right at the beginning.

cuyler works with the population, where the average person he's treating is 23 years of age in akron, ohio ken rogers is from sacramento california. and he deals with an adult population that probably goes considerably older than what i just mentioned. and last, but not least is congressman tim ryan from ohio, who represents the 13th congressional district in ohio. in addition to his leadership on the recovery caucus. he also co chairs the military and mental health caucus. . having said that, to save time. i think we'll start with jackie, and we'll just take one after the other. jackie, if you wouldn't mind

coming up to the microphone, please. thanks if i could say one thing. after each person speaks for a few minutes, we'll take questions at the end for about a half hour. >> hello, everybody, i'm so happy to be here today opinion i'm a parent/child therapist in oakland. i've had the privilege of working on the first team -- the first team specializes in working with little babies birth to seven who have been impacted with substance abuse. i'm here today for the babies, the families i serve that are struggling with mental health and substance abuse. i came across a statistic that shocked me, i imagine it will shock you too. >> based on data from the

combined 2009-2014 national surveys on drug use and health, about one in eight children are living in a home where at least one parent is a substance abuser. that's 8.7 million children. the hardest hit were the little ones. birth to two. infants and young children are the most vulnerable in our population. and they're often the collateral damage of addiction. we know from the aces study that came out of kaiser. adverse childhood experiences greatly impact children and adults as they grow up. and they have long term health issues.

when someone is growing up in a home where someone is using drugs, their trauma is stacked against them. >> i want to tell you about a mother i've treated in the past. he was difficult to soothe. he had a rough life. it was chaotic and difficult for him. thus increased his fuss aniness, when she came to my office, when i came into her home, she began to tell me that she too was a nusscy baby, and her parents were addicted, she didn't know any better, she fell into the same patterns that her parents did, but she wanted different for her little baby. she knew she needed help and she was lucky enough to get into our program, she was given the support she needed. her baby was given support. so now her little boy is two.

he is feisty and strong. his mother is in recovery and doing well. this is a story of hope. the family got the treatment they deserved. it took long study treatment and support. sadly this isn't always the case. i'm from the bay area, one of the wealthiest areas in our country. and our counter mental health system is a disaster, it's over burdened and just inadequate. the other day right before i came here, i spent hours on the phone with a your honor father with a 1-year-old baby i was treating. he had a heroin addiction and wanted to get help. he wanted to change his life, he was on methodone. i called for hours and hours, trying to find a treatment

braham for him. and each person on the other line said, nope, we don't take folks on methodone. i finally found one place in alameda county that would take him. but guess what, the line was a month long. and plus they said, he would have to detox from the methodone. now, to me that makes no sense right? we have a father who wants to get help. and he wants to get -- change his life for the better. but there's no access to treatment. >> we can do better for the kids and we can do better for the families. i'm here to tell you, after 15 years working in the field i have never met a baby that doesn't love their parent despite all they've gone through. and i've never met a patient whose struggling with addiction,

who doesn't want different for their baby. ny know that this is a painful grueling process and they want to change the patterns in their family. i'm here to say we can all do better, the kids deserve better, and the families deserve better. thank you so much for your time. >> hi, everyone, thank you for coming out this afternoon. my name is cuyler costanzo. i serve as a clinical coordinator of our treatment services. i oversee treatment in akron, our home office, we just recently opened up a halfway house and a recovery center in marrietta ohio.

we're a nonprofit community corrections agency that treats our clients for substance use disorders. we're also an approved medically assisted treatment agency. we are approved to prescribe vivitrol. we've seen some pretty good successes with that. what it does it treats the opiate addicts physical cravings, so it reduces that so we can then put together a treatment plan where we can then unpack the psychological things that they're dealing with. in counseling. we apply both those at the same time. we have other locations, not only in akron and in marrietta, we're in cleveland, tiffen, freemont and sandusky.

most of my client population, their individuals that have been sentenced for substance related charges. whether it was a possession charge, selling to support their habit, that would be a trafficking charge. operating vehicles under the influence. other things could be domestic violence, you know, robbery and stuff like that. so when -- you know, about 65 to 70% of our clients that we see have an opiate use diagnosis. the average age like jimmy was saying is 23 years of age. these are young people, good people. they've fallen into the throws of addiction. they have value. why am i here today?

i'm here to address our nation's opiate epidemic. it affects everyone. everyone in this room has been affected one way or another. maybe you know somebody, a family member, co-worker, a friend. it affects everybody. in 2015 there were 52,000 overdoses that resulted in death. in 2016 it increased to 64,000. that's a 23% increase. huge increase with this epidemic. now, in my home state of ohio. we're at ground zero, in 2015, we had 3050 overdoses that resulted in death. in 2016 it increased to 3,4050. it's out there, and it's

affecting a lot of people, it's affecting families children, employers. it is a national crisis. when i was coming out here, waiting to board the plane saturday, i picked up the akron beacon journal, on the front page it reported that in akron. the city of akron is 190,000 people, we had 58 overdoses, they didn't result in death, but we had 58 overdoses. it was probably higher than that. we're pretty good in the summit county area. >> in one week, yes, thank you. it was probably higher than that, a lot of -- we're pretty good about getting the narcan out to the families, that their loved ones are afflicted with this disorder here. so some of those were probably brought back by the narcan and not reported there you may have also read that in one week, they

had 18 overdoses that resulted in death in the cincinnati and surrounding area. they had 180 that didn't. and then there were 200 opiate deaths. they either passed out in a car, they were driving, whatever, there was a possession charge and they were incarcerated in one of the local jails. and the saddest thing is the -- you know, the innocent. the babies, and that one week there was 15 babies born that had opiate related medical concerns going on. 15, just in that one week. so most of the clients that treat that get to me, they pretty much have lots everything by the time they get to us.

they lost their job, they lost their insurance, their family. housing. esteem and with the aca and the expansion of medicaid in the state of ohio this has helped our clients to get the treatment services they need. without the medicaid expansion and aca, we wouldn't be able to help them. but even with the expansion of the medicaid, and even with the aca, we're still strapped, we're overwhelmed. we don't have enough staff, facilities, it's just the growth of the epidemic, it's alarming. in closing, i am concerned that if the aca is repealed. and if there is a cut in medica medicaid, a lot of my clients are going to continue to suffer and die. thank you.

>> and i'm a psychologist working for a medical group in northern california specifically in the sacramento area. i also serve as the vice president on the executive board of the national union of health care workers and so my comments today will reflect partially my personal experience working with patients but also the experience of my colleagues who i represent. i've come to speak to you today about how the opioid crisis is personal to the work i do as well as the consequences of failing to provide full mental health parody. while not all the patients i work with have some sort of opiate addiction, those who do have serious underlying mental health issues. opioids by the very nature, by

their very nature are pain relievers and the people i work with are in pain, they're anxious, depressed and they've reported turning to opioids to deal with this pain. i -- this solution comes at a cost. when people turn to opioids, they miss out on family celebrations, gatherings with friends, church events and most importantly work. this report is supported by national findings from a recent brookings institute report that found that between 1999 and 2015 roughly 20% of the reduction in the men's workforce participation was due to painkiller abuse. one patient in particular comes to mind, a patient that i started working with who when i started working with him had gone through treatment for

chemical dependency already. the permanente group -- not to get you guys too much into the weeds on this thing but when this person came to me, he was no longer on the opioids per se, he was using them periodically but he had started his recovery from that process, but was out of work, disconnected from family and severely depressed. he had lost his business and that he had founded himself and he was trying to find a way back and the treatment that was required was months of individual and group psychotherapy so that he was able to completely get off the opioids for starters but also to reconnect with his family and to reconnect with his life.

he eventually went back to work in the very business that he lost. he ended up selling his business to some friends and they were good natured enough to let him return to work at that location, which was very humbling for him because he founded the business and most people don't want to return to work at a place they founded, you know, as an employee, but, you know, this is what you do to get back. these are -- you know, this example is an example of someone who was in treatment, who had provided -- who had the resources to get the treatment that he needed. this is not all of the patients we work with. there are many, many people that came to our attention through the medicaid expansion that were not having any treatment at all

and the only treatment they received at all was through emergency room services when they had crisis situations. in this case, you know, these people were not getting treated at all and they would just keep coming back periodically and a lot of my colleagues in the emergency room were aware of this and brought this to my attention. we believe the way forward is by -- i'm sorry. emergency services alone are not what is needed for effective treatment. the opioid crisis is also a mental health parody crisis as well. we need better enforcement of mental health parody with medical health, stricter enforcement of existing parody laws, we need more resources for those who lost the ability to recover. we need more clinicians to help on the ground. this has been something that i've been working on a lot with

my colleagues since where there's a national shortage of mental health providers and often times even with a group like the permanente medical group, which is an excellent employer with excellent benefits, we can't hire all the positions we have, so we have just open positions and the rest of us have to pick it up and, you know, and that affects our well-being because we're working more hours and have more patients than hours to work. so, you know, one last thing i would be remiss if i didn't mention is that my colleagues and i are very frustrated that our pleas have been consistently answered with schemes to provide less and not more service for some of these issues and we're hoping that we can start to get issues of mental health parody addressed more directly. thank you.

thank you. i'm tim ryan. it's been a hard -- and kyler touched upon it in states like ohio and i know this is an epidemic happening everywhere in the country and we happen to be unfortunately in some of the worse shape but just in the course of a week in my congressional office, last week you have your staff text chains and e-mail chains so we get maybe thursday night, we get a picture from my district director and across the street there are ambulances there, the neighbor with three kids overdosed, that same night i think there were about 18 overdoses in trum bell county that one night and there's a bad batch of fentanyl going around,

not that there's a good batch but a very intense batch that made its way into the county. i was at a christmas party i remember a holiday party in december and a friend of mine is cop and city of warren which is in my county and it was probably 10:00 at night and he -- we're sitting there and hanging out and he pulls out his iphone keeps buzzing and buzzing, buzzing and he's in charge of the drug issue really with the warren p.d. and he pulls it out and he shows it to me and there's five or six different communications from the coroner and he said, these are all -- these are all heroin overdoses right here in our community and it just keeps happening over and over again. i was touring a school a couple

months back in my district and i remember -- we didn't even bring it up because we were at the school talking about several other issues and the principal kept talking about how many parents of kids in the school over the course of last year or two have overdosed and died and so it becomes an epidemic in the school and they have, you know, dozens of kids who have lost parents because of the drug overdose and many others just overdosed but maybe their parents didn't pass away. this is how deep this gets and to some of our communities and i know ken and jackie and kyler they know this and i want to thank them for being on the front lines. i see my friends from the union for being such an instrumental leader in this. as i'm wrapping up and i know we got questions and answer sessions too, just want to say that the debate this week on the graham/cassidy bill is front and

center on the opiate issue. there's no way you can talk about opiates and overdoses and kara and all of these things that we're trying to push and you're going to be pro trying to deal with this epidemic. there's no way you can vote in support the graham/cassidy bill. just to give you an example, the carzack gives a billion dollars -- okay. this was a big achievement in congress today, a billion dollars. the graham/cassidy bill takes $9 billion from just the state of ohio between now and 2026. 200,000 people accessing treatment in ohio will be thrown off and told to pull themselves up by their boot straps. this is unacceptable in the united states of america. we have an epidemic that needs

to be dealt with in a comprehensive way from law enforcement to prevention to treatment to overdose issues. all the way down in a comprehensive way. we have a bill congresswoman martha fudge and i to get rid of the imd exemption, which means basically if you get federal funding you can't have a facility that allows more than 16 people if you're dealing with mental health or addiction issues. the recommendation coming from governor chrissie. >> to see this and other events on the topic go to the video library, search opioid epidemic. we'll leave the last bit of this, take you live now to a discussion on the rise of isis and u.s. options for -- former member of the national security council part of the conversation at the international institute for strategic studies. live coverage