Our view: War on opioid emergency falls short
Amid much fanfare last October, President Trump declared that the nation’s opioid crisis was a “public health emergency” and spoke movingly of losing his older brother to alcohol addiction. That 90-day declaration is set to expire Tuesday. And while some promising plans are taking shape, the federal follow-through is falling far short.
About 1,000 people are dying each week from this epidemic, and the time is long past for the president to mobilize “every appropriate emergency authority,” as he promised on Oct. 26. Among the missing pieces:
❚ Key players. Can you name the nation’s “drug czar” these days? Probably not, because there isn’t one. The Office of National Drug Control Policy, a highprofile White House office that should coordinate a government-wide strategy, still has no permanent director, the person often known as the drug czar.
The office is run by an acting director, after Trump was forced to withdraw his first nominee. In part because the office has so many vacancies, a 24year-old former campaign worker, with an inflated résumé and no obvious experience in drug policy, recently rose to be the deputy chief of staff, The Washington Post reported Sunday.
Meanwhile, the president hasn’t nominated someone to run the Drug Enforcement Administration.
❚ More money. While the administration says it has spent or allocated more than $1 billion on the opioid crisis, huge chunks of the funding were provided under laws passed in 2016, before Trump took office.
As for fresh resources, the best a White House spokesman could offer was: “We will continue discussions with Congress on the appropriate level of funding needed to address this crisis.” Not exactly the rallying cry for resources expected in an emergency.
❚ Promised initiatives. Trump promised “really tough, really big, really great advertising” to prevent people from abusing drugs in the first place. Nothing on that yet. Nor is there any noticeable movement on a key part of his Health and Human Services Department’s five-point strategy, which touted targeting “the availability and distribution of overdose-reversing drugs.”
Health commissioners in areas hardest hit by the opioid scourge tell us they haven’t seen much federal followthrough, and it’s unclear whether the administration plans to extend the emergency declaration.
Trump said in October that under his administration’s initiatives, the number of addicts “will start to tumble downward over a period of years,” and “it will be a beautiful thing to see.” We hope so, because so far the opioid epidemic continues to look very, very ugly.