page_title: Political positions of Bernie Sanders
section_title: Drugs
hierarchical_section_title: Political positions of Bernie Sanders / Social issues / Drugs
caption_attribution_description: English: "Figure 1. National Drug Overdose Deaths—Number Among All Ages, by Gender, 1999-2017. More than 70,200 Americans died from drug overdoses in 2017, including illicit drugs and prescription opioids—a 2-fold increase in a decade. The figure above is a bar and line graph showing the total number of U.S. overdose deaths involving all drugs from 1999 to 2017. Drug overdose deaths rose from 16,849 in 1999 to 70,237 in 2017. The bars are overlaid by lines showing the number of deaths by gender from 1999 to 2017 (Source: CDC WONDER)."
context_page_description: The political positions of Bernie Sanders are reflected by his United States Senate voting record, public speeches, and interviews. He is a self-described democratic socialist. Bernie Sanders is an independent senator from Vermont who has served in government since 1981.
  In 2016, Sanders campaigned for the Presidency of the United States in the Democratic primaries. His proposed policies emphasize reversing economic inequality.
  Since the election, Sanders has criticized the presidency of Donald Trump. In February 2019, Sanders announced his candidacy in the Democratic Party primaries for the 2020 presidential election, later withdrawing in April 2020.
context_section_description: In July 2015, Sanders and Representative Elijah Cummings wrote a letter to the National Governors Association and National Association of Attorneys General asserting that the "opioid abuse epidemic is a public health emergency that must be addressed, and no company should jeopardize the progress many states have made in tackling this emergency by overcharging for a critically important drug like naloxone."
  In 2016, Sanders supported Proposition 61, dubbed the California Drug Price Relief Act, a measure preventing state agencies from purchasing prescription drugs for higher prices than the Department of Veterans Affairs pays, arguing that it would "be great for the taxpayers of California and it will be a real blow against this greedy industry that will reverberate all over America."
  On November 20, 2018, Sanders and Representative Ro Khanna unveiled a bill intended to abolish the monopoly from a company, regardless of any patents, and authorize other companies to compose cheaper generic versions of a drug in the event of the price for that drug being higher than the median price in Canada, the United Kingdom, Germany, France and Japan. Sanders said in a statement that the United States was the only country in the world that allowed "pharmaceutical companies to charge any price they want for any reason they want" and that the "greed of the prescription drug industry is literally killing Americans".
  In February 2019, Sanders was one of eleven senators to sign a letter to insulin manufactures Eli Lilly and Company, Novo Nordisk, and Sanofi over increased insulin prices and charging the price increases with having caused patients to lack "access to the life-saving medications they need."
  In June 2019, Sanders was one of fifteen senators to introduce the Affordable Medications Act, legislation intended to promote transparency through mandating pharmaceutical companies disclose the amount of money going toward research and development in addition to both marketing and executives' salaries. The bill also abolished the restriction that stopped the federal Medicare program from using its buying power to negotiate lower drug prices for beneficiaries and hinder drug company monopoly practices used to keep prices high and disable less expensive generics entering the market.
  On August 1, 2019, following the Trump administration announcing a plan that would allow the importation of cheaper prescription drugs from other countries, Sanders released a statement in which he opined that there was "no rational reason why insulin and other life-saving medications should cost ten times more in the United States than Canada" and pledged that on the first day of his presidency he would "direct the Secretary of Health and Human Services and FDA Commissioner to allow pharmacists, wholesalers and patients to purchase FDA approved prescription drugs from Canada."
caption: Yearly overdose deaths from all drugs in the United States[377]
exif: {"Image XResolution": "120", "Image YResolution": "120", "Image ResolutionUnit": "Pixels/Inch", "Image ExifOffset": "78", "EXIF ColorSpace": "sRGB", "EXIF ExifImageWidth": "1106", "EXIF ExifImageLength": "524"}