Trump administration falls short combating nation’s opioid crisis

During pandemic, opioid deaths reach highest level in 5 years

WASHINGTON — President Donald Trump on Thursday expressed his deep support for Americans facing drug addiction in a proclamation of National Substance Abuse Prevention Month and renewed his administration’s “unyielding commitment to breaking the grip of alcohol and drug addiction.”

Trump’s expression of empathy came just two days after he mocked Joe Biden’s son’s history of drug addiction during the chaotic presidential debate.

The president’s contradicting sentiments are reflected in the way his administration has responded to the nation’s drug crisis over the last four years, with its irregular commitment exemplified by the unsteady performance of the Office of National Drug Control Policy, the government’s flagship agency in the fight against drug abuse.

Trump has run the office much the way he has approached governance in general, showing skepticism, ambivalence and a lack of focus according to government audits, documents and drug policy specialists. Under his leadership, ONDCP employees have cycled out and failed to marshal a cohesive and measurable anti-drug plan. It served as a way station for political appointees, documents and interviews show.

For most of Trump’s administration, the office, created by Congress to lead efforts related to illegal drugs, has not delivered on a central mission: an annual strategy to guide more than a dozen federal agencies and hundreds of billions of dollars in federal spending, government auditors wrote in 2019.

With opioid deaths now surging during the pandemic to their highest level in five years, critics say the office is falling short again during its greatest challenge under Trump.

Lawrence “Chip” Muir, who served as general counsel and acting chief of staff in the administration’s first year, said ONDCP officials faced daunting odds early on because of the opioids epidemic. But the White House marginalized the office and did not follow through on other coordination efforts. Muir said ONDCP should have done more to help drug abusers, doctors, hospitals and others during the COVID-19 pandemic.

“Everyone knows what economic and psychological depression does to at-risk populations,” Muir told the Washington Post. “There was an opportunity for real-time strategy and guidance during the pandemic that could save lives, and I just didn’t see it.”

Josh Sharfstein, a physician and vice dean for public health practice at Johns Hopkins University, gave the ONDCP’s coronavirus response a “middling” grade. Some measures were helpful, such as waiving regulations so people in treatment did not have to make in-person visits to get buprenorphine, a medication used to treat addiction. But, Sharfstein said, the office did not make as generous allowances for people being treated with methadone, which he said is easily prescribed by physicians for non-drug treatment uses.

Though Trump repeatedly claimed success in its management of the opioid crisis, the ONDCP struggled to coordinate more than a dozen other agencies in a multibillion-dollar counterdrug effort. Last summer, the administration took credit for ending what it said was a 29-year streak of rising deaths from opioid overdoses. Within weeks, the death toll began to rise again.