No state has been spared from the scourge of the opioid epidemic. In 2016 alone, 42,000 Americans died due to opioid-related overdoses– or about 115 Americans per day.

Our state of Utah has also been badly hit: nearly 6 Utahns die per week from opioid-related overdoses and three rural Utah counties were identified recently by the U.S. Department of Agriculture as being among the most vulnerable nationwide.

We cannot let this tragic epidemic continue without a fight. And thankfully, Utahns have already been stepping up to the plate.

For years, groups like the Utah Coalition for Opioid Overdose Prevention and the Utah Department of Health have worked diligently to combat this crisis. And since last year, Utah Attorney General Sean Reyes and DEA District Agent Brian Besser have complemented their efforts by forming the Utah Opioid Task Force, which I have been honored to serve on as Co-Chair.

Task Force Members have traveled across the state educating citizens on the perils of opioid dependency and the importance of treating addiction as a disease. They have promoted Naloxone use by first responders, a powerful medication that can often reverse an opioid overdose. They have backed successful DEA and attorney general prosecutions of drug cartel players, and supported various treatment and recovery services.

Furthermore, the Task Force also has worked with physicians to change prescribing practices. As a result, opioid prescriptions have been on the decline.

These initiatives have yielded real results around our state. Similar efforts can work in every state in the union, if given time and space to tailor themselves to specific local needs. But just as we know the opioids crisis has many sources, we know it’s going to have at least as many solutions.

And we also know – from common sense and hard experience – that unaccountable federal grant programs aren’t going to help. Unfortunately, the opioid legislation recently passed in Washington features just that: dozens of grant programs with little accountability for how these dollars will be spent and minimal measurement of their effectiveness.

To be sure, I am not opposed to the entirety of the bill. There are some good measures that could produce real results. For example:

The bill strengthens the Customs and Border Protection’s authority to discover and destroy packages containing illegal controlled substances;

It establishes a system to identify and stop suspicious orders of opioids from drug manufacturers and distributors;

And it requires the FDA to review challenges and barriers of developing non-addictive pain medications, and to update its processes to ensure it is capable of assessing the safety and effectiveness of novel drugs before approving them.

Unfortunately, these measures did not come to the Senate floor for us to consider individually. Instead, they were lumped together with dozens of other bills in this 350-page package. And each Senator was forced to either support or oppose the entire package.

It is crucial to recognize that there is no single opioids crisis. There are dozens. There is a rural crisis, and an urban one that is different. There is a crisis hitting poorly educated Americans and one hitting the highly educated. There’s one that’s hitting adults, and another that’s hitting kids.

And all of these vary by region. In some states overdoses are caused more by prescription drugs, while in others they are caused more from illicit drugs like fentanyl. In some cases, deaths are caused primarily from a combination of drugs.

As findings from the Social Capital Project at the Joint Economic Committee show, there is also a strong social component to this crisis. Individuals who either never married or are divorced—and especially those with only a high school education—represent a higher share of those who have died from opioid-related causes.

These factors cannot be ignored. We must find ways to reach these individuals and reintegrate them into our communities.

Utah’s efforts and results are reason to hope. Our state was one of just 14 where opioid deaths actually fell last year.

We need to continue this local focus here in Utah – where we can best tailor our solutions and effectively reach people succumbing to the grip of the opioid crisis. American lives depend upon it.

By the end of this month, DC Circuit Court of Appeals Judge Brett Kavanaugh is going to be Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh. Senate Democrats are not happy about this fact and they did everything they could to stop Judge Kavanaugh’s confirmation process this week.

But Judge Kavanaugh is so well qualified (he received the American Bar Association’s top for the Court) and he has such a clear track record of judicial independence (he ruled against the Bush administration 8 times in the first two years after President Bush appointed him to the DC Circuit) that desperate Democrats had little real ammunition. So, they made stuff up.

In her opening statement, ranking member of the Senate Judiciary Committee Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-CA) claimed that “deaths from illegal abortions in this country ran between 200,000 and 1.2 million” a year. But that is just false. According to the Guttmacher Institute, which is where Feinstein claimed she got her facts, there were under 200 deaths from illegal abortions in 1965. The 1.2 million number was the total number of illegal abortions. Quite a big difference.

Despite missing her abortion death number by a factor of 1000, Feinstein wasn’t done fumbling the truth. She then asserted that “hundreds” of school shootings had taken place with assault weapons. As The Washington Post later noted, this is completely false. Only a few school shootings have been conducted with so-called “assault weapons” – most have been committed using common shotguns, hunting rifles, and hand guns.

Neither of these policy points should have anything to do with how Judge Kavanaugh approaches the legal issues presented to a court, but Democrats could at least try and get their facts right when arguing that courts should be setting social policy for the nation.

Sen. Cory Booker (D-NJ) did not land any of the punches he threw at Kavanaugh either. His main line of attack stemmed from the Democrats unprecedented request for all documents Kavanaugh touched while serving as President Bush’s White House Staff Secretary. When President Obama nominated Justice Elena Kagan to the Court, Senate Republicans did request all documents from her time as Deputy Assistant to the President for Domestic Policy to President Clinton. And the Clinton Presidential Library did give those documents to the Senate.

But Republicans did not request any of the documents from Kagan’s time as President Obama’s Solicitor General. They knew those documents were privileged. Democrats, however, asked for all of Kavanaugh’s documents from President Bush’s White House and, pursuant to the Presidential Records Act, President Bush did assert executive privilege over many of those documents. President Bush’s appointed lawyer ended up marking some of the documents as “confidential” which meant senators could see them but the documents could not be made public.

Sen. Booker then claimed he had a confidential email from Judge Kavanaugh titled “racial profiling” and asked, “It seems that you are O.K. with using race to single out some Americans for extra security measures because they look different, but you’re not O.K. with using race to help promote diversity.”

But when President Bush’s lawyer later said the Judiciary Committee could make that email public, it turned out that Judge Kavanaugh had been arguing against using racial profiling against Muslims in the wake of 9/11. Turns out Kavanaugh was against using race to single out some Americans all along!

Sen. Kamala Harris (D-CA) also played a little game of hide the ball, asking Kavanaugh if he had ever had a conversation about Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation with anybody at the law firm of Kasowitz Benson & Torres. When Kavanaugh admitted he did know everyone at the firm and asked her to identify which specific lawyer she was talking about, Harris declined, demanding, “I'm asking you a very direct question. Yes or no?” Kavanaugh then admitted he couldn’t answer since he didn’t know everyone at the firm.

Harris later told reporters that “I have good reason to believe there was a conversation,” and that, “information that I’ve received is reliable and I asked him a clear question and he couldn’t give a clear answer.” But Harris then completely failed to provide any such information or evidence. She had nothing all along.

Why would Democrats go through such embarrassing lengths to stop Kavanaugh?

Because too many judges have become far too willing to interpret the law based on their policy preferences, not what the law actually says. We need judges that respect the founding principles of federalism and separation of powers. Because if judges were to rediscover these principles, then the Supreme Court would not be as powerful as it is today, and out nation would be less divisive.

Judge Kavanaugh has a proven track record of upholding these principles and that is why he will soon be Justice Kavanaugh.

True bipartisan public policy reform is rare these days. Successful public policy reform is even rarer. But that is exactly what happened in 1996 when a Republican House, a Republican Senate, and a Democratic President fought through a toxic partisan political environment to pass a historic realignment of the American welfare state.

At the time, President Clinton called the Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act of 1996, “the end of welfare as we know it.” And the legislation was a sea change in American welfare policy. No longer would the Aid to Families with Dependent Children program guarantee a check each month with no strings attached. Instead, most welfare recipients would be expected to work, or participate in job training programs, after two years of receiving benefits.

At the time, many on the left predicted these new work requirements would be Armageddon for struggling families. Sen. Patrick Moynihan (R-NY) predicted we would “find children sleeping on grates, picked up in the morning frozen.” Sen. Frank Lautenberg (D-NJ) said we would see “children begging for money, children begging for food, eight- and nine-year old prostitutes.” And Sen. Ted Kennedy (D-MA) called the bill “legislative child abuse.”

But guess what? The left was wrong.

Between 1996 and 2000 single-mother welfare caseloads fell by 53 percent, their employment rate increased by 10 percentage points, and their poverty rate fell by 10 percent. And the consumption-based poverty rate among single parent families has continued to fall since then: from 23 percent in 1995, to 15 percent in 2000, to 9 percent in 2010.

Unfortunately, some on the left have never accepted the reality of welfare reform. To this day they continue to deny the ability of work requirements to move struggling families out of dependence and into the workforce. Fortunately these activists have failed to undo the changes made to federal cash-assistance programs made in 1996.

But they have managed to undermine the success of welfare reform in other ways.

Medicaid used to be a narrowly targeted program designed to provide health care for only our most vulnerable populations including individuals with disabilities, low-income children, pregnant women, and seniors. But due to a number of expansions, Obamacare’s Medicaid expansion being the biggest, Medicaid is now a broad-based welfare program. In 1969 just 6 percent of Americans were on Medicaid. Today 22 percent of Americans use the program.

Food stamps have also seen a similar transformation from a cyclical program providing temporary relief during rough economic times, to a way of life for far too many Americans. Technically referred to as the Supplemental Nutritional Assistance Program, SNAP’s participation rate used to rise during recessions and then quickly fall after. But due to expanded eligibility rules passed during the Great Recession, that didn’t happen this time. A full nine years after the recession ended in 2009, the proportion of the U.S. population receiving SNAP is 48 percent higher now than when the recession began in 2007.

By expanding non-cash welfare programs like Medicaid and SNAP far beyond their original intended scope, the left has accomplished an end run around the ground breaking successful work requirement reforms made to cash welfare programs in 1996.

It is not surprising that this increase in non-cash welfare dependence coincided with a drop in labor force participation among working-age adults. Between 2000 and 2017 the overall labor force participation rate among working age adults fell from 77.6 to 74.2 percent.

America works better when Americans are working. We need to reverse the recent trend in falling labor force participation by applying the same work requirements that worked for cash-welfare programs to non-cash welfare programs.

Families do better when they move from dependence to self-sufficiency. And we as law makers should do everything we can to make sure our safety net programs are designed to make that happen.

It is one thing to understand a public policy issue abstractly. It is quite another to see up close how those same policies affect the lives of real Americans.

That is why it is so important for everyone to see the upcoming documentary, “The Sentence,” a movie about the human costs of mandatory minimum sentencing laws, which I had the honor of co-hosting this week with Sen. Cory Booker (D-NJ).

The movie tells the story of Cindy Shank, a mother of three who was convicted on four drug charges in 2008.

Her troubles began in the late 1990s, when Cindy’s then-boyfriend began dealing drugs. In 2002, this same man was murdered outside the home they were sharing in East Lansing, Michigan. As police investigated the murder, they discovered that Cindy’s boyfriend ran a large drug conspiracy and that while living with Cindy assisted her boyfriend by counting money and receiving drug shipments at their home. After her boyfriend’s death, Cindy managed to turn her life around. She got married and started a family. She began raising three wonderful daughters.

Five years later, police came knocking on her door. Prosecutors sought to punish Cindy to the maximum extent allowable by federal law, asking the judge for 89 years in jail. The judge thought the prosecutor’s request was unfair and unjust, and wanted to give Cindy as little jail as possible. Unfortunately, due to mandatory minimum sentencing laws passed by Congress, 15 years was the shortest sentence the judge could give. His hands were tied.

Cindy’s youngest daughter was less than six-months old at the time. Her middle daughter was two. Her eldest was four. Their mother had done nothing wrong during their entire lifetimes and was remarkably reformed, but now they were all about to be punished for the rest of their lives.

“The Sentence” chronicles that punishment. It puts very real human faces on the damage done to families and communities by excessively punitive mandatory minimum sentences.

Our country needs strong drug laws. We need to punish offenders that prey on our community. But we also need smart drug laws that distinguish between major and minor offenders. We need fair drug laws that the public believes in and supports. Because without that support, without that belief in the system’s legitimacy, unfair mandatory minimum sentencing laws do more harm than good.

Fortunately this is a problem Congress can fix. Excessively punitive mandatory minimum sentencing laws were created by Congress and they can be undone by Congress. The Senate already has several pieces of legislation begin to address this the problem. Earlier this year, the Judiciary Committee overwhelmingly reported the Sentencing Reform and Corrections Act to the floor, where it awaits a vote. Alternatively – and perhaps more realistically – we can add sentencing provisions to the First Step Act. Doing so would offer a serious opportunity to enact a criminal justice reform bill and enable us to get a bill to the President Trump’s desk this year.

But we need your help. Please share this trailer to The Sentence. Please go see this movie when it is released in October. And please tell your friends and family to do the same.