Washington offers disjointed response to the opioid crisis

Every 10 minutes on average, another American dies of a drug overdose.

A record 64,000 of these deaths occurred last year, up 22% from the previous record year of 2015. And this year is shaping up to be even worse as the opioid epidemic continues spiraling out of control, fueled in part by addictive medications that drug makers funnel into communities where pills are then overprescribed or sold into a black market of drug dealing.

Amid this carnage, the government’s response has been disjointed. Donald Trump promised as candidate to attack the problem and two months into office appointed a special commission. In July, that panel recommended declaring a national emergency to free up addiction-treatment resources and allow Medicaid to pay for more detox.

Trump said he would declare the emergency but didn’t follow through. Instead, he nominated as national drug czar a congressman from Pennsylvania, Tom Marino, who last year ushered through Congress a law that actually diminished the power of federal drug agents to block large drug companies from pouring prescription narcotics into stricken communities.

The detrimental impact of that law and Marino’s machinations to get it passed were exposed Sunday in an investigation by The Washington Post and 60 Minutes. According to that report, certain pharmacies were selling more than a million pain pills a year where the average should have been 74,000.

Behind the sales, major drug distributors were shipping pill volumes far larger than any community could reasonably absorb. One West Virginia county of 25,000 people was flooded with 11 million doses of oxycodone and hydrocodone from 2007 to 2012.

The Drug Enforcement Administration’s response in the worst cases was to block pill distribution with an immediate suspension order against a drug company, citing imminent danger to the community. The industry fought back with years of intense lobbying and millions of dollars in campaign donations. Marino’s measure sailed through Congress on voice votes and was signed by President Obama in 2016.

The law toughens the legal standard for a suspension order to the point where it’s “all but logically impossible” to block mass drug distributions into communities, according to an analysis cowritten by the DEA’s chief administrative judge, John J. Mulrooney II.

To be sure, the drug epidemic was out of control long before the Marino bill passed. And concerns have been raised that abruptly shutting down distribution can harm legitimate users of pain medication, or force addicts to turn to deadly illegal substitutes such as heroin.

Even so, Congress needs a more thoughtful answer than wildly swinging from one enforcement tack to another. And Trump needs to do more as well.

On Tuesday, Marino rightly dropped out of contention for drug czar. That job should now go to a public health expert, not a politician.

Prodded by reporters, the president said he’d make a “major announcement” about the epidemic — next week. That’s about 1,200 overdose deaths from now.