Opiod crisis is national emergency, Trump says
President officially declares crisis, says U.S. will spend “a lot of effort and a lot of money” on problem.
President Donald Trump on Thursday declared the country’s opioid crisis a national emergency, saying the epidemic exceeded anything he had seen with other drugs in his lifetime.
The statement by the president came in response to a question as he spoke to reporters outside a national security briefing at his golf club in Bedminster, N.J.
“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,” he said.
Last week, the President’s Commission on Combating Drug Addiction and the Opioid Crisis, which is led by New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie, issued a preliminary report that described the overdose death toll as “September 11th every three weeks” and urged the president to declare a national emergency.
On Tuesday, Trump received an extended briefing on the subject in Bedminster. White House aides said Trump was still reviewing the report and was not yet ready to announce which of its recommendations he would embrace.
A White House statement issued Thursday evening said that 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. But 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.
“There’s no doubt that this shines a brighter light on the epidemic. It remains to be seen how much this will fundamentally change its course,” said Caleb Alexander, co-director of the Johns Hopkins Center for Drug Safety and Effectiveness. “No one thinks the recovery from this is going to be fast, emergency or not.”
The emergency declaration may allow the government to deploy the equivalent of its medical cavalry, the U.S. Public Health Service, a uniformed service of physicians and other staffers that can target places with little medical care or drug treatment, said Andrew Kolodny, co-director of opioid policy research at the Heller School for Social Policy and Management at Brandeis University.
“There’s a lot that could be done. It could be very helpful, much more than just symbolic,” he said.
Governors in Arizona, Florida, Maryland and Virginia have already declared emergencies. And in recent months the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the Food and Drug Administration, Congress, physician groups and the insurance industry have all taken institutional steps to address the crisis.
At the street level, police, firefighters and paramedics now routinely carry the anti-overdose drug naloxone.
Drug addiction is a widespread and growing problem, with an estimated 2.6 million opioid addicts in the United States.
The report issued last week states: “The opioid epidemic we are facing is unparalleled. The average American would likely be shocked to know that drug overdoses now kill more people than gun homicides and car crashes combined.”
The report actually understated the lethality of the epidemic. The commission based its estimate of the number of fatal drug overdoses on 2015 statistics, when 52,404 people died of overdoses of all drugs, including opioids, for an average of 142 a day. But new federal data covering the first nine months of 2016 showed that the death toll jumped significantly since 2015 and could reach 60,000 once the numbers are all in for that year.
In Thursday’s briefing, Trump said, “It is a serious problem, the likes of which we’ve never had. You know, when I was growing up, they had the LSD, and they had certain generations of drugs. There’s never been anything like what’s happened to this country over the last four or five years.”