Stepping up the opioid fight

This editorial appears on Bloomberg View:

America’s opioid crisis keeps getting worse. More than 33,000 Americans died from opioid overdoses in 2015, the highest on record, and millions still abuse the drugs. Efforts to control the epidemic abound. But opioids are extraordinarily addictive, and the pattern is shifting: Many people who became hooked on prescription opioids go on to use heroin, or worse, fentanyl, which is many times as potent.

So federal and state officials are trying increasingly tough approaches. In New Jersey, a patient’s first course of opioids is now limited to five days and the lowest effective dose. Meanwhile, the Centers for Disease Control has launched a campaign to warn about the risk of addiction. And Tom Price, the secretary of Health and Human Services, is promising to make it easier for the addicted to get treatment. The use of methadone in treating addiction has doubled success rates. And states are preventing deaths by making the antidote naloxone available. There may also be a place for more traditional lawenforcement tactics. A Senate bill would outfit border police with screening devices to help detect fentanyl being smuggled into the U.S. from Mexico and China.

America’s opioid epidemic is growing and changing, and it will take both ingenuity and determination to bring it under control.