Trump vows to tackle America’s opioid epidemic
UNITED STATES: US President Donald Trump has declared the country’s opioid crisis a national emergency, saying the epidemic exceeds anything he has seen with other drugs in his lifetime.
‘‘The opioid crisis is an emergency, and I’m saying officially right now it is an emergency. It’s a national emergency. We’re going to spend a lot of time, a lot of effort and a lot of money on the opioid crisis,’’ Trump said yesterday outside a national security briefing at his golf club in Bedminster, New Jersey, where he is on a working vacation.
Last week, the President’s Commission on Combating Drug Addiction and the Opioid Crisis issued a preliminary report that described the national overdose death toll as ‘‘September 11th every three weeks’’ and urged the president to declare a national emergency.
The White House said Trump ‘‘has instructed his administration to use all appropriate emergency and other authorities to respond to the crisis caused by the opioid epidemic.’’
The scale of the crisis, which has been building for well over a decade, is such that a presidential declaration may not have much immediate impact. It should allow the administration to remove some bureaucratic barriers and waive some federal rules governing how states and localities respond to the drug epidemic. One such rule restricts where Medicaid recipients can receive addiction treatment.
Drug addiction is a widespread and growing problem in the US, with an estimated 2.6 million opioid addicts.
Governors in Arizona, Florida, Maryland and Virginia have already declared emergencies, and in recent months the Centres for Disease Control and Prevention, the Food and Drug Administration, Congress, physician groups and the insurance industry have taken institutional steps to address the crisis.
At the street level, police, firefighters and paramedics now routinely carry naloxone (brand name Narcan), an anti-overdose drug that can yank an addict back from the brink of death.
The crisis had its origins in the 1990s, when the pharmaceutical industry marketed new formulations of prescription opioids. Soon they flooded the market, making the US by far the world’s leading consumer of such painkillers. Many addicts later switched to street heroin.
Once stereotyped as a problem in largely white, rural and economically depressed Rust Belt communities, the opioid epidemic has been killing large numbers of people of all races in big cities in recent years. - Washington Post