CNN N. H. Town Hall: on Drugs

Pete Buttigieg: Put boundaries on what phamra companies can do

BUTTIGIEG: Of course. This is part of why we have government, is to make sure that it stands up for people. When people are disempowered by the behavior of a private actor, whether we're talking about an insurance company, whether we're talking about a provider, or whether we're talking about a pharmaceutical company. And we should not be afraid to put boundaries on what these companies can do in order to make sure that patients come first & families come first. That's part of why we have laws to begin with. The laws are too loose, and their enforcement is too lax. That will change when I'm president.

Andrew Yang: Take billions from drug companies to fix opioid crisis

So the question is: How are you going to help your people actually get off of these drugs? First you have to get back all the blood money from Purdue Pharma and the other drug companies. Take all the billions of dollars away and say "This is going to be a down-payment on treatment."

The second thing you have to do is say to our people, "Look, this is not an individual failing; this is a plague that our government essentially helped happen. It's a plague of hyper-capitalism run amok. And if we catch you struggling with drugs, we are going to refer you to counseling and treatment and not to a prison cell."

Elizabeth Warren: Opioid crisis has stigma like AIDS & needs increased funding

WARREN: The estimate I've seen is that 193 people die every day from addiction and overdoses. [I realized two parts about] the opioid crisis and how much it looked like the AIDS crisis. One is a lot of stigma, so people don't like to talk about it; people don't come for help. And the other part is, the resources we need, our federal government, was always just an hour late and a dollar short.

Q: N.H. has twice the national average of opioid deaths. What is your plan?

WARREN: A little boy named Ryan White said that he had AIDS and Congress said, "This is it." We put the resources into the research, and brought down the number of deaths. Why not do the same thing with the opioid crisis? And that is put in the real resources. It will take a lot of money, about $10 billion a year for the next 10 years. But think of what we're losing every day. The best estimate is it's costing us $50 billion a year, this crisis. Put the money in.