Gov’t spending no cure for addiction
President should tell it like it is with drugs
The speech on opioid addiction that Donald Trump should have given in Manchester, N.H., yesterday:
Ladies and gentlemen of the great Granite State:
As a candidate for president, I came here to New Hampshire and promised I would solve the opioid crisis. As president, I called New Hampshire a “drug infested den” and pledged that I would use the power of the federal government to fix it.
Ladies and gentlemen … I was wrong.
Well, except for the “drug-infested” part. I mean, the numbers here are, like, crazy. This small state has the third-highest drug overdose rate in the country — behind West Virginia and Ohio! More than 450 overdose deaths last year? New York City only had about half that many total murders last year, and they have more than 8 million people!
It’s a problem, folks, no doubt about it. And I know you’re all expecting me and the rest of the government to fix it. How? By spending more money on Medicaid? Building a wall at the border before the bad guys can bring the drugs in? And for drug dealers — the death penalty! Sounds good, right?
Yeah, none of that works.
First, nobody would love giving the needle to a narco kingpin more than me. In fact, I think we should go back to public hangings. Or even better — put it on TV! Pay-perview! We could make a reality show, where the convicts compete. … Hey, Kellyanne, let’s talk about this when we get back to D.C. My agent’s gonna love it.
What was I saying? Oh, yeah. Get tough on drug dealers. Look, I love it, but I’m a businessman and I have to look at the bottom line. More prosecutions, putting more people behind bars, that all costs a lot of money. And when you look at the numbers, the states who put the most druggies in jail — states like Louisiana and Oklahoma — have the same opioid addiction and death rates as states that put few people in jail. There’s no correlation between longer sentences and less opioid addiction.
So then people say, “Donald, spend more money on drug treatment. Give more money to Medicaid.” But when we look at those numbers on a state-by-state basis as well, what do they show?
Well, in 2015, New Hampshire was one of the seven states with the highest drug-overdose death rates. You know what else those seven states had in common? They all took the Obamacare Medicaid expansion deal. These states are getting more free money from the federal government than ever for Medicaid, and they’re seeing more drug deaths.
Folks, spending more tax money on government just doesn’t work. We’ve had a “drug czar” since 1988, he spends $380 million a year — and our problems are getting worse. Drug overdoses killed roughly 64,000 people in the United States last year, according to initial estimates from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, and have become the leading cause of death for Americans under 50. The agency also reported last month that emergency room visits for suspected opioid overdoses increased by 30 percent from July 2016 through September 2017.
Look, I like telling it like it is, and this is it: The best treatment for opioid addiction can’t come from government. It comes from friends and family getting involved in an addict’s life. Getting them into treatment, getting them to their meetings, letting them know you love and care about them. It’s hard. It means you giving up your time, being inconvenienced and, yes, often disappointed. It’s a lot harder than just spending some tax money.
It also means more drugs. Drugs like methadone that help wean addicts off their addictions. If we’re going to spend money, we should spend it on methadone treatments, not government bureaucrats.
More drugs, hard work and no easy fixes. That’s the speech I should give. But hey, even I’m not that crazy.