Treat opioid addiction as emergency.

Gov. Rick Scott called up reinforcements this week in Florida’s battle against opioid addiction. It was a belated but welcome move.

By declaring opioid addiction an emergency in Florida, Scott will speed the distribution of $54 million in badly needed federal funds over the next couple of years for prevention, treatment and recovery. This will include increased access for first responders to naloxone, a drug that reverses the deadly effects of an opioid overdose.

Opioids include heroin, related illicit drugs such as fentanyl, and a potent family of legally prescribed painkillers, including OxyContin, Percocet and Vicodin. Abuse of these drugs in Florida began surging four years ago. Almost 3,900 people in the state were killed by opioids in 2015, the last full year for which figures are available from the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

Scott issued his declaration Wednesday, a day after disturbing testimony at a workshop in Orlando on the escalating crisis in Central Florida. But the declaration came more than two months after state Senate Democratic leader Oscar Braynon of Miami Gardens appealed for one on behalf of his party’s 15-member delegation.

At the workshop in Orlando, a crowd of 150 people — including recovering addicts, parents, treatment providers, judges and lawenforcement officers — packed the Orange County Commission chambers. Many of them called on the state to make drug treatment more widely available.

Dick Jacobs, president and CEO of Aspire Health Partners, the region’s largest provider of treatment for substance abuse and mental illness, put the need for action in stark terms. “There are people dying in our community,” he said. Aspire’s vice president of medical development, Shannon Robinson, argued more funding needs to be available for patients who can’t afford treatment.

Legislators who control the state’s budget share the blame for failing to respond sooner and more forcefully to the opioid crisis. For years they have shortchanged funding for drug treatment.

This week they restored $2.5 million for a successful pilot program that dispenses Vivitrol, a drug that curbs opioid cravings, to jail inmates. Recidivism is way down among inmates at the Orange County Jail who have participated — less than 9 percent, compared with 70 percent among addicts who haven’t gone through the program. However, even the restored funding is just half what the program received in the last budget.

Legislators who are reluctant to spend more state dollars on the opioid epidemic need to remember that it costs taxpayers less to prevent and treat opioid addiction than to deal with its consequences — ruined lives, broken families, unemployment, homelessness, crime, arrests, incarceration, emergency medical care and death.

Orange County has set a positive example for leaders throughout the state on tackling the opioid crisis. In August 2015, Mayor Teresa Jacobs and Sheriff Jerry Demings convened a task force to fight heroin addiction in the county. Thanks to the task force’s efforts, more than 1,100 law-enforcement officers in the county now carry naloxone, and at least 78 lives have been saved since July. The task force is now pursuing a wide-ranging 37-point action plan.

Legislators, in addition to providing some funding for the Vivitrol program, voted this week to toughen penalties on fentanyl trafficking — also a priority for Jacobs and Demings — and crack down on fly-by-night drug rehabilitation facilities. These are positive steps.

But it’ll take additional resources and sustained attention from state leaders to confront this crisis. That means treating it like an emergency, not just calling it one.