A worsening emergency

President Trump, it’s the emergency room calling to report an emergency, rapidly getting more acute. Help! Doctors can barely keep pace with the swelling numbers of patients arriving through their ER doors after overdosing on heroin, morphine, fentanyl, brand-name pain pills — opioids.

The 52 cities and counties in 45 states that share stats with the federal Centers for Disease Control reported 140,000 suspected overdoses between July 2016 and September 2017. That’s a staggering increase of 30% over that time period.

Young, old, men, women, the plague is leaving no segment of society untouched.

Sixteen opioid-afflicted states that supply comprehensive numbers to the CDC suffered a 35% increase in ODs. Worst hit were big cities, up 54%, and the Midwest, up 70%.

Still more OD’d users are now never even setting foot in an ER, after getting revived using Naloxone — and, in the vast majority of cases, going right back to their addictions.

The only answer to a plague this large is a multifaceted approach that invests dramatically in treatment, attacks the supply of illicit street drugs and tries to rein in the overprescription of drugs like Oxycontin, which gets thousands hooked in the first place.

The White House declared a public health emergency last year, but offered no new funds to fight the opioid epidemic. In fact, Trump’s budget is hitting Medicaid, vital to fighting the opioid epidemic, hard.

More like it, here in New York, Gov. Cuomo proposes a modest tax on new opioid prescriptions. Money raised will go directly to a fund to improve treatment.

Patient by patient, addict by addict, we dug ourselves into the enormous hole as a country. It’s not going to be easy, but we’ve got to bring out the heavy machinery to start digging ourselves out.