WARREN TAKES ON OPIOID CRISIS
Floats $100B plan
U.S. Sen. Elizabeth Warren yesterday called on Congress to allocate $100 billion over the next 10 years to combat the opioid epidemic.
At a press conference and panel discussion at Boston Health Care for the Homeless Program, the Massachusetts Democrat said she and Rep. Elijah E. Cummings (D-Md.) plan to introduce legislation next week that would funnel the most money to communities with the highest drug overdose rates and those with the highest raw number of overdoses.
“Massachusetts would receive tens of millions of dollars a year ... (and) reduce the stigma around addiction head-on by treating it like any other disease,” Warren said. “Addiction is not a moral failing.”
The senator called on the federal government to treat the opioid epidemic similarly to how it attacked the AIDS epidemic in the 1980s.
The bill is modeled after the Ryan White CARE Act, which targeted federal funds to parts of the country most impacted by HIV. Those communities then formed local planning councils to decide funding priorities, such as prevention, treatment and support services.
White, an Indiana teenager, became a global advocate for AIDS patients after he contracted the disease through a blood transfusion. He died in 1990.
Warren and Cummings’ bill also would require pharmaceutical executives to certify that their companies are not breaking the law in terms of the diversion of their opioid products or the way the drugs are labeled and marketed. If a company does break the law, its executives could be held personally accountable.
Warren has said that President Trump’s declaration that the opioid crisis is a public health emergency has amounted to little more than empty words, and his announcement that he will seek the death penalty for drug dealers shows how little he knows about the epidemic or how to fix it.
In 2016, 42,249 people — nearly 116 people each day — died from opioid-related overdoses in the U.S., more than in any previous year on record, according to the Department of Health and Human Services. An estimated 40 percent of those deaths involved a prescription opioid.
In Massachusetts, 1,977 people died of overdoses last year, down from 2,155 in 2016, but still more than 200 deaths greater than the previous year’s toll.