Los Angeles Times

More money sought to fight opioid crisis

$4.6 billion from the government is not enough, advocates say.

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CHERRY HILL, N.J. — The federal government will spend a record $4.6 billion this year to fight the nation’s deepening opioid crisis, which killed 42,000 Americans in 2016.

But some advocates say the funding included in the spending plan the president signed Friday is not nearly enough to establish the kind of treatment system needed to reverse the crisis. A White House report last fall put the cost to the country of the overdose epidemic at more than $500 billion a year.

Former U.S. Rep. Patrick Kennedy, a Democrat who served on President Trump’s opioid commission last year, said that there are clear solutions but that Congress needs to devote more money to them.

“We still have lacked the insight that this is a crisis, a cataclysmi­c crisis,” he said.

By comparison, the Kaiser Family Foundation found the U.S. is spending more than $7 billion annually on discretion­ary domestic funding on AIDS, an epidemic with a death toll that peaked in 1995 at 43,000.

States also have begun putting money toward the opioid epidemic. The office of Ohio Gov. John Kasich estimates the state is spending $1 billion a year to address the crisis. Last year, New Jersey allocated $200 million to opioid programs, and the budget proposal in Minnesota calls for spending $12 million in the coming fiscal year.

The opioid allocation is part of the $1.3-trillion budget appropriat­ion Trump signed Friday. In a budget deal full of compromise­s, this was one element both parties heralded.

Addiction to opioid painkiller­s, including prescripti­on drugs such as Vicodin and OxyContin and illicit drugs such as heroin and fentanyl, is causing deep problems across the country. It’s being blamed for shortened life expectanci­es, growing burdens on foster care systems, and strains on police and fire department­s.

The budgeted response amounts to about three times as much as the federal government is spending now to address the epidemic, not counting treatment money that flows through Medicaid and Medicare.

“This bill provides the funding necessary to tackle this crisis from every angle,” Sen. Roy Blunt, a Missouri Republican who is chairman of a subcommitt­ee overseeing much of the funding, said in a statement. “It’s another major step in our effort to get this epidemic under control and save lives.”

The biggest chunk of new money in the congressio­nal appropriat­ion — $1 billion — is to be distribute­d to states and American Indian tribes. States with the highest overdose mortality rates would receive larger shares, a provision that’s important to hard-hit states with small population­s such as West Virginia and New Hampshire. Every state would receive at least $4 million.

The plan also includes $500 million for opioid-related research and hundreds of millions more to expand treatment availabili­ty.

Andrew Kolodny, co-director of an opioid policy research group at Brandeis University, said he believes it would take a 10-year commitment to funding $6 billion annually to build a system that would make medication-assisted treatment accessible to everyone who needs it.

The federal appropriat­ion also contains money for law enforcemen­t and equipment to help identify and intercept opioids at borders and ports of entry.

Van Ingram, executive director for the Kentucky Office of Drug Control Policy, said that law enforcemen­t is not the key to solving the epidemic but that he appreciate­s the additional federal money for policing.

Providing law enforcemen­t in Kentucky with naloxone, a drug that can reverse overdoses, is a major expense for his office. Federal help is now available to defray some of those costs.

Some of the federal money also will go toward helping people being released from prison avoid the drugs and toward expanding specialize­d courts for veterans and people with drug dependency.

 ?? Chip Somodevill­a Getty Images ?? FORMER REP. Patrick Kennedy called the opioid epidemic “a cataclysmi­c crisis.”
Chip Somodevill­a Getty Images FORMER REP. Patrick Kennedy called the opioid epidemic “a cataclysmi­c crisis.”

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