Top NY Dems call on Cuomo to resign
ALBANY, N.Y. — New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo confronted a stunning series of defections Friday amid allegations of sexual harassment that left the high-profile Democrat fighting for his political survival, angry and alone.
By day’s end, the threeterm governor had lost the support of almost the entire 29-member New York congressional delegation and a majority of Democrats in the state legislature. None of the desertions hurt more than those of New York’s two U.S. senators, Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer and Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand.
“Due to the multiple, credible sexual harassment and misconduct allegations, it is clear that Governor Cuomo has lost the confidence of his governing partners and the people of New York,” the Democratic senators wrote in a joint statement. “Governor Cuomo should resign.”
The escalating political crisis has spawned an impeachment inquiry in an overwhelmingly Democratic state, and threatens to cast a cloud over President Joe Biden’s early days in office. Republicans have seized on the scandal to try to distract from Biden’s success tackling the coronavirus pandemic and challenge his party’s well-established advantage with female voters.
Biden, a longtime ally of Cuomo and his father, former New York Gov. Mario Cuomo, has avoided directly addressing the controversy, although it’s becoming increasingly difficult.
Since 1999, when the unconstrained prescription of painkillers was beginning to emerge as a public-health crisis, more than 535,000 lives have been lost to opioid overdoses. If that grim number seems familiar, it’s just a bit higher than COVID-19’S toll of 527,000 deaths so far.
COVID-19 and the opioid crisis are linked in other ways too. The pandemic has driven an alarming increase in overdose fatalities over the past year, as people struggling to recover from opioid dependence have been undone by isolation, job loss and the added difficulty of getting support and treatment with social distancing rules in effect. The 12 months ending last July saw 61,000 deaths, a surge from the previous year — even though the period includes only the first five months of the pandemic.
To its credit, Congress has set aside billions of dollars in stimulus spending to address mental health and substance use disorders. But health providers say still more is needed — particularly since states have slashed their budgets for addiction treatment amid the pandemic. Policymakers at all levels of government need to wake up to this emergency and redouble efforts to tackle the problem.
It remains essential to continue to discourage doctors from overprescribing pharmaceutical opioids — a yearslong campaign that has led to a 40% drop from the 2011 peak. But the massive shift in the drug epidemic to illicit opioid abuse also calls for strengthened efforts to block the supply of street drugs and get users into effective treatment.
So far, the government has not taken the problem seriously enough.
One big law enforcement challenge is to block the importation of fentanyl, which is sent to American dealers through the mail directly from China or carried over the southwest border from Mexico, and to find and dismantle fentanyl pill-pressing operations in the U.S. This means continuing to work with Chinese authorities to stop fentanyl manufacture and export, and reducing backlogs at Customs and Border Protection labs that test suspicious substances.
At the same time, harm-reduction efforts are needed. With a substance as lethal as fentanyl circulating, states, cities, doctors and pharmacies must see that users have access to naloxone, the overdose-reversal drug, and to test strips that can detect the presence of fentanyl. Users should be provided with treatment options at every encounter they have with emergency rooms, hospitals, clinics and prisons. People addicted to opioids require access to effective treatment with buprenorphine, a medication that can keep people in recovery from relapsing by reducing cravings without causing euphoria.
During the pandemic, federal and state agencies have made it easier for people with opioid-use disorder to obtain buprenorphine and methadone, a similar treatment, by loosening restrictions that had limited doctors’ ability to prescribe via telehealth and by allowing more takehome doses of methadone. These changes should be made permanent.
More important still, the federal requirement that doctors have special training before they are allowed to prescribe buprenorphine should be lifted. The Biden White House has reversed a Trump administration action intended to do this, over questions about its legality; it should quickly find a legitimate way to accomplish the same thing. Alternatively, Congress could take care of it, and at the same time require that doctors who prescribe opioid painkillers understand how to prevent, identify and treat addiction.
States, which are soon expected to receive tens of billions of dollars from drugmakers, distributors and others to settle claims that they were partly responsible for the opioid crisis, should make sure that money is spent to mitigate the crisis, including by expanding addiction treatment.
On the national level, President Joe Biden has promised greater spending to address drug abuse. It’s encouraging that he has already hired people to strengthen the Office of National Drug Control Policy. Now he should engage with Congress and the states to finally provide the policing and health care the U.S. needs to bring the opioid crisis under control.