Thank you. That's wonderful. I appreciate it.
I want to thank both witnesses for providing testimony here today.
I'm going to start with you, Dr. Humphreys. I really appreciated your entire report in the Stanford-Lancet commission.
I'm going to pull one quote:
At the same time, evidence clearly shows the folly of assuming that population health inherently improves when health-care systems provide as many opioids as possible with as few possible regulatory constraints as possible. Policies that should attract skepticism include dispensing of hydromorphone from vending machines and prescribing a range of potent opioids and other drugs, ([i.e.] benzodiazepines [and] stimulants) to individuals with OUD in hopes of creating a safe addictive-drug supply and eliminating the supervision of methadone patients—i.e., converting the system to unmonitored, long-term prescriptions on a take-home basis.
I was wondering if you could expand on that a bit, because I think this is so much the crux of the issue we're in.