Thank you, Ben, for that kind introduction, and thank you
for your 13 years of service to the Department of Justice.
Thank you also to Kentucky U.S. Attorneys Rob Duncan of the
Eastern District and Russell Coleman of the Western District, U.S. Attorney
Mike Stuart of the Southern District of West Virginia, and the Assistant
Attorney General in charge of our Criminal Division Brian Benczkowski.
Thank you all for your work to reduce crime in this
community and across America.
As each one of you knows, this Department of Justice
supports you, your prosecutors, and the state and local partners you work with.
We strongly support first responders and victims of crime.
And so—before I say anything else—I want to announce our
next step to do just that.
Today, I am announcing that the Department of Justice will
provide $16 million for the victims of last October’s mass shooting in Las
Vegas and for the first responders who came to the scene. These funds can be used to help pay for
counseling, therapy, rehabilitation, trauma recovery, and legal aid. These new funds will build on the $3 million
that we have already provided for law enforcement officers in the Las Vegas
area.
We cannot undo the harm that was done that day, but we are
doing what we can to help Las Vegas heal.
We are also working to reduce gun violence in this
country. On Wednesday, I announced a new
Memphis Crime Gun Strike Force, which will bring together the ATF and Memphis
police to find, investigate, and prosecute firearms offenders.
But we have to acknowledge the hard truth that drugs are
killing more Americans than guns—a lot more.
Nationwide in 2016, there were more than four times as many
fatal drug overdoses as there were gun homicides.
Your work to fight the opioid epidemic is more important
than ever—because today we are facing the deadliest drug crisis in American
history. Last year 70,000 Americans lost
their lives to drug overdoses. That is
the highest drug death toll in American history—by far. That’s roughly the size of the population of
Canton, Ohio, dead in just one year from drug overdoses. More Americans died of drug overdoses last
year than from car crashes.
Despite rising prosperity and better technology, life
expectancy in the United States actually declined over the last three years—and
largely because of this epidemic. The
last time life expectancy in this country declined for three years in a row was
a century ago. This is simply
unacceptable.
And overdose deaths don’t tell the whole story. Millions of people are living with the
painful consequences of a family member’s addiction or an addiction of their
own. I personally know people whose
families have been impacted by drug addiction.
We all do.
Appalachia has been especially hard hit by addiction and by
opioid fraud. Some of the first pill
mills in America were started right here in Southern Ohio and Northern
Kentucky. And to this day these communities
still have tragically high rates of addiction and overdose.
The drug overdose death rate in Ohio more than doubled from
2013 to 2017. And here in Cincinnati,
drug overdose deaths increased by 79 percent from 2014 to 2017.
The vast majority of those overdose deaths are from
opioids. Statewide, 85 percent of
overdose deaths in 2017 were from opioids.
This is a daunting situation. Your work to stop drug trafficking has never
been more difficult—but it has also never been more important.
The Trump administration has your back in these
efforts. The President has laid out a
comprehensive plan to end this crisis.
The three parts of his plan are prevention, enforcement and treatment.
President Trump has improved our prevention efforts by
launching a coordinated national awareness campaign about the dangers of opioid
abuse.
And he is a strong supporter of law enforcement.
Under his leadership, the Department of Justice has put a
special focus on fighting the deadliest drugs today: synthetic opioids like
fentanyl.
These drugs are so powerful that all it takes is the
equivalent of a pinch of salt to be fatal.
Not only are they powerful—they’re also easy to get. You can go online and have them shipped right
to your door.
Over the past two years, synthetic opioids have killed more
Americans than any other kind of drug.
Last year these drugs killed more than 28,000 Americans. Here in Ohio, 70 percent of overdoses deaths last
year were fentanyl-related.
That’s why we’ve placed a special focus on prosecuting
fentanyl cases over these past two years.
And we’ve been getting results.
Last July, the Department announced the seizure of a website
that was the largest dark net marketplace in history. It’s called AlphaBay. It hosted more than 220,000 drug listings and
was responsible for countless fentanyl overdoses, including the tragic death of
a 13 year old.
In August, we announced charges in the Northern District of
Ohio against a married couple who sold fentanyl on Alpha Bay. In fact, we believe they were once the most
prolific synthetic opioid traffickers on the darknet in North America. We also worked with our partners in Canada to
help them indict a man we believe was the third most prolific darknet synthetic
opioid dealer in North America.
In January, we began J-CODE, a new team at the FBI that
focuses specifically on the threat of online opioid sales. They have already begun carrying out
enforcement actions nationwide, arresting dozens of people across the country.
And in some of the districts where drug deaths are the
highest, we are prosecuting every fentanyl trafficking case we can, even when
the amount of drugs might be small.
We tried this strategy in Manatee County, Florida—just south
of Tampa—and it worked. This past
January, they had half the number of overdose deaths as the previous
January. The Manatee County Sheriff’s
Office went from responding to 11 overdose calls a day to an average of one a
day.
This summer, we expanded that effort to 10 districts across
America—including both Ohio districts, Southern West Virginia, and Eastern
Kentucky. We call it Operation
S.O.S.—and we’re sending 10 more AUSAs to help carry out this strategy.
But fentanyl isn’t made in Ohio or any of these
districts. The vast majority of the
fentanyl in this country is made in China.
That is why the Trump administration has become the first
administration to prosecute Chinese fentanyl traffickers.
A year ago, we announced the first two indictments against
Chinese nationals for trafficking synthetic drugs in the United States. In August, we announced our third case—a
43-count indictment against a drug trafficking organization based in Shanghai.
This summer I went to China and met with Chinese officials
to discuss this problem. I made it clear
to them that we want them to be our partners in these efforts—and that they’ve
got to do more to stop these drugs from coming here.
But I am thankful that some help is on the way. Last month, President Trump signed into law
the STOP Act, which was authored by Senator Rob Portman of Cincinnati. This new law means that when packages come in
from overseas, the Postal Service will have to tell Customs and Border
Protection basic electronic information like where it’s from, where it’s going,
and what’s in it. That information will
help law enforcement find dangerous packages and the criminals who are sending
them. Just as importantly, the criminals
will know that—and it will deter many of them shipping drugs in the future.
We are already interdicting drugs coming into this country
at higher and higher levels. In fiscal
year 2018, the DEA seized 70 percent more fentanyl than the year before. DEA seized enough drugs to kill every man,
woman, and child in the United States.
Those interdiction efforts are important and necessary. But we know that one of the major causes of
the opioid crisis in the first place was overprescribing. We’re told that three out of four heroin
addicts in the United States first started on prescription opioids. Even if that is an overestimate, that is
still too many.
That’s why President Trump has set the goal of reducing the
national opioid prescription rate by one-third in three years. It’s an ambitious goal, but we are well on
our way to achieving it.
According to the DEA’s National Prescription Audit, in the
first eight months of 2018, opioid prescriptions were down by nearly 12 percent
compared to a year before. And that's in
addition to a seven percent decline last year.
We now have the lowest opioid prescription rates in 18
years. And we’re going to bring them a
lot lower.
For next year, the DEA is lowering the legal limits on
opioid production by an average of 10 percent.
That will bring us to about a 44 percent decrease in opioid
production since 2016.
We are making it harder to divert these pills for abuse—and
we’re going after the fraudsters who exploit people suffering from addiction.
Two years in a row the Department of Justice has set records
for health care fraud enforcement. This
July we charged 601 defendants with more than $2 billion in medical fraud. This was the most doctors, the most medical
personnel, and the most fraud that the Department of Justice has ever taken on
in any single law enforcement action. This is the most defendants we’ve ever
charged with health care fraud and the most opioid-related fraud defendants
we’ve ever charged in a single enforcement action.
So far under President Donald Trump, the Department of
Justice has charged more than 220 doctors with opioid-related crimes and
convicted more than 80 of them. Sixteen
of those doctors prescribed more than 20.3 million pills illegally. We have also charged another 221 other
medical personnel for opioid-related crimes.
In fiscal year 2018, the Department of Justice charged six
percent more drug defendants than in fiscal year 2017. We prosecuted 36 percent more opioid
defendants than the previous four-year average.
We increased heroin prosecutions by 15 percent and oxycontin
prosecutions by 35 percent. We have dramatically
increased the number of fentanyl prosecutions at the federal level two years in
a row.
Those numbers are important—but what is more important is
that overdose deaths in Ohio and across this country may have finally stopped
rising.
From 2012 to 2017, drug overdose deaths per year in this
country increased by 74 percent.
According to the CDC, drug overdose deaths increased on a
month-by-month basis until September 2017.
The rolling 12-month total then decreased by two percent from September
2017 through April 2018, which is the most recent data we have.
Here in Ohio, the second half of 2017 saw 23 percent fewer
overdose deaths than the first half of 2017.
From September to the end of the year, overdose deaths dropped by 17
percent.
Of course, we want much bigger decreases, but this is very
encouraging news.
And we’re not going to stop there. We are continuing to support you and help you
succeed.
Last month we announced our new Appalachian Regional
Prescription Opioid Strike Force.
This new Strike Force combines the investigation,
prosecution, and data analytics resources of the Criminal Division, nine U.S.
Attorneys’ offices, and the FBI, DEA, and the Department of Health and Human
Service’s Inspector General.
This new strike force will be composed of 12 additional
opioid fraud prosecutors across our nine Appalachian districts and the
surrounding areas. That includes the
districts represented by each of the U.S. Attorneys who are here today.
Each one of these new AUSAs will have their own team of
federal investigators and law enforcement agents. They’ll also be mobile—so if a small case
turns into a bigger case, then they can prosecute it any Appalachian district
they need to.
The Southern Hub will be based in Nashville, where I visited
yesterday.
And the Northern Hub of the Strike Force will be based just
across the river from here in Fort Mitchell.
We’ve already used this Strike Force model to combat health
care fraud—and it has been very successful.
In Detroit and Miami—which were the first two cities where we deployed
our Health Care Fraud Strike Force— Medicare Parts A and B billings have
dropped by a total of more than $2 billion since 2010.
We want to replicate that kind of success in the fight
against the opioid epidemic.
This new Strike Force is going to build on the successes
that we have already achieved over these past two years, and I believe that it
can help provide some relief to Appalachia and to Southern Ohio.
I especially want to thank Matt Miner and Joe Beemsterboer
for their great work in setting up this ARPO Strike Force. I know that you
spent countless hours on the road over the past couple of months. But I also
know that your tireless efforts, in conjunction with the work of the Strike
Force prosecutors as well as the AUSAs in the United States Attorneys’ Offices,
will pay countless dividends.
This is our latest step—but it is not our last step. We are going to keep up this pace. We are going to keep supporting you, arming
you with new resources and new weapons.
We are going to keep coordinating with you and listening to you about
how we can help.
And so I want to conclude with something a mentor of mine
used to say every time he spoke to law enforcement, and I believe it too: we
have your back, and you have our thanks.
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