Opioid emergency
With President Donald Trump declaring an opioid epidemic, the federal government will waive some rules and give states more flexibility in tackling the issue.
WASHINGTON — President Donald Trump announced Thursday that he was directing his Department of Health and Human Services to declare the opioid crisis a public health emergency, taking long-anticipated action to address a rapidly escalating epidemic of drug use in the United States.
The move falls short of Trump’s sweeping promise to declare a national emergency on opioids, which would have prompted the rapid allocation of federal funding to address the issue. The directive does not on its own release any money to deal with a drug crisis that has become a grim reality across the country, claiming more than 59,000 lives in 2016.
No community spared
But it would allow some grant money to be used for an array of efforts to combat opioid abuse and would ease certain laws and regulations to address it.
“No part of our society — not young or old, rich or poor, urban or rural — has been spared this plague of drug addiction and this horrible, horrible situation that’s taken place with opioids,” Trump said at a ceremony attended by families affected by opioid abuse.
“We cannot allow this to continue,” Trump added. “It is time to liberate our communities from this scourge of drug addiction.”
The announcement was intended to fulfill a vow that the president made when he assumed office to make tackling opioid abuse one of his top priorities. But he has taken limited action to carry it out.
Administration officials argued Thursday that a national emergency declaration was not necessary or helpful in the case of the opioid crisis, and that the powers associated with a public health emergency were better suited to address the issue. The Trump administration, they said, would work with Congress to secure money to combat opioids in a yearend spending package, including through the Public Health Emergency Fund.
Trump said his plan would include bypassing a rule that bars Medicaid funding from being used for many drug rehabilitation facilities, requiring federally employed prescribers to be trained in safe practices for opioid prescriptions, and a new federal initiative to develop nonaddictive painkillers. He also said the government would produce “really tough, really big, really great advertising” aimed at persuading Americans not to start using opioids in the first place.
“This was an idea that I had, where if we can teach young people not to take drugs,” Trump said, “it’s really, really easy not to take them.”
In August, Trump called the opioid crisis a “national emergency.” But he did not sign a formal declaration designating it as such, allowing the prospect to languish amid resistance in his administration about making an open-ended commitment of federal funds to deal with an issue that has shown no signs of abating. The crisis has claimed tens of thousands of lives, a death rate that one administration official noted Thursday rivals the number of Americans killed during the Vietnam War.
Waiting on drug czar
Beyond the lack of funding, it is unclear how much impact the public health declaration will have in the short term, given that Trump has yet to name central players who would carry it out. That includes a drug czar to steer a broader strategy on opioids and a secretary of Health and Human Services who would tailor policies and identify sources of funding.