Stepping up the fight against opioid addiction

This editorial appears on Bloomberg View:

America’s opioid crisis keeps getting worse. More than 33,000 Americans died from opioid overdoses in 2015, the highest on record, and millions still abuse the drugs.

Efforts to control the epidemic abound, such as new national prescribing guidelines for doctors, more state drug courts and increased access to addiction treatment. But opioids are extraordinarily addictive, and the pattern of abuse is shifting: Many people who became hooked on prescription opioids go on to use heroin, or worse, illicit fentanyl, which is many times as potent. Fentanyl overdose, which can occur almost instantaneously when the drug is taken, is mainly what’s driving the death rate skyward.

So federal and state officials are trying increasingly tough approaches. In New Jersey, for example, a patient’s first course of opioids is now limited to five days (30 has been the norm) and the lowest effective dose. A similar bill in the U.S. Senate would limit first prescriptions to seven days. The Senate is also considering taxing prescription opioids to help pay for addiction-treatment services, as are lawmakers in Alaska and California.

Meanwhile, the Centers for Disease Control has launched an ad campaign to warn Americans about the risk of addiction. And Tom Price, the secretary of Health and Human Services, is promising to make it easier for the addicted to get treatment.

All these efforts are laudable, if piecemeal. But as the crisis expands, so must the response to it.

The use of methadone and buprenorphine in treating addiction, now being expanded nationwide, has doubled success rates. And many states are now preventing deaths, especially from fentanyl overdose, by making the antidote naloxone available.

There may also be a place for more traditional lawenforcement tactics. A Senate bill would outfit border police with chemical screening devices to help detect fentanyl being smuggled into the U.S. from Mexico and China.

America’s opioid epidemic is growing and changing, and it will take both ingenuity and determination to bring it under control.