Video, Audio, Photos & Rush Transcript: Governor Hochul Signs Legislation Package to Combat Opioid Crisis

Earlier today, Governor Kathy Hochul at John Jay College signed legislation (S.911/A.2354, S.1795/A.533, S.2523/A.868, S.6044/A.128, S.7228/A.5511) aimed toward reducing drug-related overdose deaths across New York State and encouraging those suffering from addiction to seek help in their recovery.

VIDEO of the Governor's remarks is available on YouTube here and in TV quality (h.264, mp4) format here.

AUDIO of today's remarks is available here.

PHOTOS will be available on the Governor's Flickr page.

A rush transcript of the Governor's remarks is available below:

Good morning and thank you for the warm welcome. It is so great to be back here at John Jay. I just want to thank our president for always making us feel so welcome here. We've done many events. We will continue to do events because the simple presence of being here signals our commitment to people who find themselves trapped in the criminal justice system. And we come here and we talk about policies and ideas and inspiring the next generation of leaders who will carry on the values that we treasure here as New Yorkers. So thank you so much for hosting us, giving this opportunity to be here today.

I am joined by the dream team. The individuals that'll be joining me here today are the ones who are toiling out there. They're the ones who are listening to their constituents, they're the ones meeting with the advocates, they're the ones having the hearings in Albany, they're the ones penning the legislation late at night and getting it over the finish line. And I believe that they deserve the credit. I am here to sign because this is a statement of my priorities, but also I want to give equal credit to all of our legislators.

Let's give them another round of applause. Dick Gottfried, Senator Jamaal Bailey, Senator Pete Harckham, Senator Gustavo Rivera, Assemblymember Jeff Dinowitz, and our home Senator here, Senator Brad Hoylman, and my great friend, Gale Brewer, who I see every day of the week, it seems. But that's always a pleasure. That's always a pleasure.

This is personal to me. It was about six years ago when we lost my beloved nephew to addiction. And he started out like many other families experience. He did not set out to be a teenage addict. That was not his goal in life. He was a young athlete, he was outgoing, he was a joy at our family gatherings. Michael just had the zest for life. And he worked hard. His family didn't have a lot of money. He worked at a delicatessen like I did. I worked at a deli. I worked at a pizzeria. And I happen to know that there's some very sharp equipment there. I actually have some scars from when I got burned on a pizzeria. But he cut his hand deeply on a piece of equipment at the delicatessen, goes to the doctor to heal him, to heal him. And he follows a doctor's directions. Doctor prescribes a teenager a supply of opiate-based prescription drugs to alleviate the pain. The pain continues. Another prescription continues. The next thing we know, he's developed an addiction and he finds that it's cheaper to acquire the drug that makes him feel better as his brain chemistry has now changed because it begins to change after a matter of days and weeks, where the addiction forms and he starts going to the streets. Streets are cheaper, easier, hides it from his mom for as long as he can. Gets into trouble. Ends up in jail. His mom has to be strip searched to go visit him in jail, in our community. The indignity inflicted on our family for people who still loved Michael, but saw that he had become a different person.

We never gave up hope in Michael. Michael had to do his time. He came out, we thought we had a facility to put him in. The Medicaid papers were not in order and they sent him home. So we didn't get the home that he thought he was going to be spending the next few months in in recovery, when he was ready to do it. And he went back, it all started all over again. The addiction, trouble, streets, homeless shelter. And we actually thought he was starting to turn the corner again because it takes a long time, my friends. It's not once, twice, it could be a hundred times, but ultimately people do persevere. Michael didn't live long enough because what he thought he could handle had been laced with a new form of fentanyl, which was this deadly concoction where he thought he could handle it to deal with some stress of the day, despite the fact that he was back in school, and he'd actually become a coach for other people in addiction, he started on that path and the fentanyl took him down. His mother found him with the needles in his arms. And we buried him a few days later after a wake that drew probably 500 people. I had no idea of the people he had already been touching to give them hope, to give them inspiration and how devastated they were when they saw that someone who believed in them and their recovery did not survive themselves.

That's why this is personal for me. I don't want other families to endure this. I want people, all the Michael's out there who are struggling, who fell into this place that no child ever expects to be in. No parents expect their child to fall in, no one expects their brothers and sisters, but life happens, my friends. There's no reason to point fingers or to blame or to find a cause, we just deal with what we're dealing with right here and right now. When the State of New York has the ability to take steps that can just minimize the stress that people are going through to make it easier on them and their families, to let them know that there should not be stigma associated with seeking medication assisted treatment or any other variation that you need to get yourself in order, we have to send a message. We are there with you. You are still an important part of my family, our family, the New York family. And that is the message that has to be shouted out across this state, that there are good people with great potential and they're just dealing with an illness, right now.

And how do we deal with that illness? That's what I think our legislators for doing, putting together smart people. I know there was a gathering here about five years ago. And you talked about what happened in prisons and talking about how people, while they're doing their debt to society, for whatever they did, they also can be on a treatment plan so when they come back out, they can start talking about a job, they're got opportunity and they may continue even more healed than when they went in. Why wouldn't we take advantage of that opportunity to invest in people, give them something as simple as medication to help them deal with their illness while they're incarcerated, just like we would make sure that they have their diabetes drugs, or their cancer drugs or something else to deal with whatever their ailment may be?

That's how you de-stigmatize it, but you also just say, and we're going to help you heal because we want you back in society. I want fewer people in prisons. I don't want you going out stealing again like Michael did and ending right back in there. I can stop that cycle if we're smart enough that while we have the captive audience, so to speak, that we can help you heal and then we won't see you again. We'll see you at the job fair. Then we'll see what your job, we'll see in the grocery store and life returns to normal.

That's the path we're on with the bills we're signing today and I'm proud of them. And I want to thank again, the leaders and all the advocates. And I want to thank people like Cassandra. Thank you for dedicating your life and representing so many other groups up there. The Executive Director of the Drug Policy Alliance. This alliance is powerful. Your voices are heard, I hope you know that. And that is why we're here today. You made sure we listened. Your elected officials responded. And that's what brought us here today. So, this is not a celebration of what a governor does today. It's what this community asked for and receive when you have people who actually do more listening and say, yes, I understand what you're going through.

I understand that there's hope behind these bills. I will briefly talk about what exactly they are. I know you know what they are. Assemblymember Rosenthal did a beautiful job describing the situation. I don't need to go back through that, but I think everyone knows, I know everyone knows, that we had a crisis before with respect to the addiction and opiate substance abuse and the number of people succumbing to this after COVID it is a crisis on steroids. It has gotten so much worse because people found themselves so discombobulated, so taken out of their normal world, and their support systems, whether it was in school or their job or their family, and they couldn't get to their recovery coaches, they couldn't get the medication. So many people fell through the cracks, no fault of their own because of this pandemic.

So now the problem that we were already dealing with has just gotten so much worse and we lost over 5,100 New Yorkers from a preventable overdose last year alone, 5,100 families that just are saying, how did that happen? How did that happen? Overdoses continue to kill more New Yorkers than car accidents, suicides and homicides combined.

That is a problem that can no longer be swept under the rug. That is real it's affecting, not just families that affects our economy effects, productivity work. There's a ripple effect to this crisis. And that's why as much as we mourn each individual will continue to do so. We also want to talk about their families for one minute and thank the families that have sometimes turned their grief into helping others.

And that's exactly what my sister and my niece did for her brother. They became trained recovery coaches. And so to them, I extend my eternal gratitude and let them know we're going to continue signing bills and we'll continue making policies to help lift them out of the abyss that many of them find themselves in.

So we are assigning five comprehensive and forward thinking, overdose prevention bills. What we're trying to do is just remove barriers to treatment. It's really simple. It's really simple barriers to treatment. And first of all, I also approach this job as just, there's just some common sense things to do.

Aren't they're not? I mean, you've been talking about this for seven years, some of these five years. I'm really impatient to get to know me as your governor. I'm like, okay, why didn't we do this yesterday? That's how I roll, ask my family.

And so you think about the fact that right now, think about the illogical nature of this. I mean, let me tell you this right now, syringes are illegal in the State of New York. There are some police officers locking people up for possession of a syringe, right. The jails are full enough. I think we don't need people in there for syringes possession.

On the other hand, the State of New York gives out millions of syringes to help people because of the public health crisis. So, okay. You're going to jail, but it's okay for the State of New York to do this, does anybody think that should continue to be the law in the State of New York? Okay. All right.

That's why we're going to do this, Gustavo Rivera recognized it. And Richard Gottfried from the assembly, they recognize this. They said, can we just fix this? And today we are going to decriminalize the possession of a syringe in the State of New York.

And another issue when I was a co-chair of the heroin opioid task force, it took me to every corner of the state. Over the last seven years, we had many hearings. We talked to people, I went to visit jails. I talked to sheriffs. I said, what's the problem like in your jail? Well, we don't have the resources. We don't really want to do this. Everybody has a different philosophy about what happens to people incarcerated. I spoke about this earlier. Luckily we have Senator Jamaal Bailey and Assemblymember Linda Rosenthal, who said, let's fix this. Why aren't we helping people while they're in jail?

So our second bill that we're signing and is going to make tremendous sense, but it's also going to make a difference in people's lives. And that we are now mandating medication base systems treatment in all New York state jails and prisons that will now be available to anyone in prison who needs it.

Senator Pete Harckham and Assemblymember Rosenthal also said, why don't we have an online directory? So people can find out where to get the opioid antagonists or reversal drugs. And I can't tell you how many first responders I've spoken to, who said they have saved thousands of lives because they had Naloxone with them or another opioid overdose, reversal drug with them.

And so why isn't that a widely available? There are parts of our state where people still know how to get this. How simple is it for the State of New York to have an online directory, tell you where to get it, make it available over the counter, which was one of the recommendations that our task force came up with a few years ago.

And let's get it done. Let's just make it more accessible to New Yorkers so we can save lives and then get people into recovery. Let's get that done as well. That's the third bill we'll be signing as well. Senator Sanders, I don't know if Senator Sanders had a chance to arrive yet. If you are, here's a clap for him.

And Assemblymember Dinowitz also, they also said why- this is another one of those logic ones friends. This is so much easier sometimes to just see what's going on here. We're trying to encourage people to use opiate reversal drugs, right? Their opiate reversal treatment drugs.

We can do this, we want to encourage it. But yet right now in the State of New York, that can be used as evidence of a crime against you. Do you think that's a disincentive to use it, my friends? It sure is. Does it make sense? No. It's gone. We're getting rid of that today as well. So Naloxone, another life-saving drug, but no longer used as evidence in court that a crime has been committed.

Also Senator Bailey and Assembly Member Richardson have our last bill, which expands the number of eligible crimes for a person to be diverted for substance abuse treatment. Yes. Why don't we help people get them through this? Stop, locking them up. If their crime does not justify it. And we can make sure that we can start turning their lives around.

And then you start turning a community around, a neighborhood around. We start turning the state around because we're believing in people and not treating people who are suffering from an illness, like the Assembly Member said, like they are criminals. That is the change that we're making here today by signing these well-thought our bills.

And I'm going to give you one more message. We're not finished yet, my friends. These are five bills. They're profound. They're going to make a difference. But I'm going to continue to listen, as I have for many, many years to all of the advocates. I've spoken at more conferences and forums and small gatherings and launched more initiatives, whether it's mobile vans or programs in schools, I've done it all.

But I also know there's more to be done and I'm going to listen to your ideas - new ways that we can make sure that we're using the latest available medication, what works, what doesn't work. We're going to make sure that New York State leads the nation in terms of how we deal with this crisis because our people are suffering. They need us. And the people in this room are going to help us get that done. So thank you very much, everyone.