Trump decree aids opioid fight
WASHINGTON — President Donald Trump pledged Thursday to “use every appropriate emergency authority” to fight the nation’s opioid epidemic, vowing to do everything from cracking down on fentanyl shipped from China to launching a sweeping advertising campaign educating young people about the dangers of drugs.
“Nobody has seen anything like what’s going on now,” said Trump in a White House ceremony announcing that he was designating the opioid epidemic a public health emergency.
“As Americans, we cannot allow this to continue. It is time to liberate our society from this scourge of drug addiction. We can be the generation that ends the opioid epidemic.”
Trump urged every American to fight the drug epidemic, which claims an average of 175 Americans a day.
However, while Trump changed a number of rules and regulations, his action did not provide money — which state and local officials say is desperately needed to treat the drug crisis. An Ohio State University study released Wednesday showed the state has the resources to meet only 20 to 40 percent of the need for treatment facilities.
Still, Ohio and other states could benefit from Trump’s move to lift a Medicaid requirement that limited drug treatment centers to no more than 16 beds.
Cheri Walter, CEO of the Ohio Association of County Behavioral Authorities, said easing that regulation should help.
“It’s going to make beds available for the opioid epidemic very quickly,” she said. “And a lot of people are in need of services, particularly in a residential-type setting.”
Lori Criss, CEO of the Ohio Council of Behavioral Health and Family Services Providers, said she is hopeful that Trump’s moves will free additional resources and remove barriers to treatment.
“If we are going to be successful in addressing and defeating the opioid epidemic, we must use this emergency declaration to turn our full attention and resources to the prevention and treatment of addiction,” she said. “Jails, prisons and emergency rooms are ineffective, expensive and inhumane responses to this crisis.”
Some of the praise for Trump’s plan came with reservations.
Rep. Tim Ryan, D–Niles, backed the emergency designation, but said, “If we are going to make a real impact on the opioid epidemic, President Trump and congressional Republicans need to put their money where their mouth is.” He said the Public Health Emergency Fund only has $57,000 in its coffers to address the crisis.
Ohio Sen. Rob Portman and Reps. Bill Johnson, R–Marietta, and Bob Latta, R– Bowling Green, attended the White House ceremony, as did a Dayton family that houses two foster children whose biological parents are addicted.
Portman labeled Trump’s decision to declare the crisis a public health emergency “a positive step forward.” But he called for the Senate to pass a handful of bills he is pushing to address the crisis. Among them: A bill advocated by him and Ohio Democratic Sen. Sherrod Brown that would provide for better screening of the U.S. mail to help prevent synthetic opioids such as fentanyl from being shipped from overseas. Trump addressed that issue in his remarks, saying he planned to talk to Chinese President Xi Jinping about it during an upcoming visit to China.
Trump spoke of the issue in sometimes deeply personal terms.
“My brother Fred was a great guy,” he said. “He was the best-looking guy, he had the best personality — much better than mine. But he had a problem. He had a problem with alcohol.”
Trump said he became a lifelong teetotaler because of his brother’s warnings not to drink.
He vowed a “massive advertising campaign” aimed at urging kids not to take drugs in the first place. “They will see the devastation and ruination it causes to people and people’s lives,” he said, promising that the campaign would bring down overdoses and addictions. “It will be a beautiful thing to see,” he said.
Jon Keeling, a spokesman for Ohio Gov. John Kasich, praised the announcement. “We fully recognize the challenge facing Ohio, and we welcome any additional resources provided by the federal government to better arm those on the frontlines combating addiction in our communities,” he said.
Ohio Attorney General Mike DeWine also heralded the president’s announcement, saying “the action items the president announced today
will help on many fronts, including prevention, education, treatment and law enforcement.”
Public health emergencies allow the secretary of Health and Human Services additional flexibility, such as accessing money from the Public Health Emergency Fund, waiving some Medicare, Medicaid, health insurance privacy and Children’s Health Insurance Program requirements, appoint personnel to respond to the emergency and give states flexibility in how they use federal dollars.
Trump did not, however, declare a national state of emergency that would have allowed states to access funding from the federal Disaster Relief Fund — an account typically used to pay for the response to tornadoes and hurricanes. In a briefing with reporters early Thursday, Trump administration officials said such a designation would not have been appropriate for the crisis, which has already spanned years. Such disasters — usually managed by the Federal Emergency Management Agency — are short-term and geographically specific.
A public health emergency — such as the one Trump signed — typically lasts 90 days, but it can be extended.
The designation comes two months after Trump’s Aug. 10 announcement that the opioid epidemic was a “national emergency ... the likes of which we’ve never had.” The delay, administration officials said, came because a legal review was needed first.
“My first thought was, ‘what took the president so long?’” said Sen. Brown on CNN. Still, he said he hopes the declaration will “marshal the forces of the federal government to do the right thing.”
“This is a plus today, and I applaud him doing it.”
PHOENIX — U.S. prosecutors leveled charges Thursday against the billionaire founder of an opioid medication maker that has faced increasing scrutiny from authorities across the country over allegations of pushing prescriptions of powerful painkillers amid a drug epidemic that is claiming thousands of lives each year.
The fraud and racketeering case against Insys Therapeutics founder John Kapoor came the same day President Donald Trump declared the opioid crisis a nationwide public health emergency.
The case naming Kapoor follows indictments against the company’s former CEO and other executives and managers on allegations that they provided kickbacks to doctors to prescribe a potent opioid called Subsys.
In the new indictment, Kapoor, 74, of Phoenix, and the other defendants are accused of offering bribes to doctors to write large numbers of prescriptions for the fentanyl-based pain medication that is meant only for cancer patients with severe pain. Most of the people who received prescriptions did not have cancer.
It also alleges that they conspired to mislead and defraud insurance providers who were reluctant to approve payment for the drug when it was prescribed for patients without cancer.
U.S. prosecutors in Boston brought the case as they vowed to go after problem opioid makers similar to how they target “cartels or a street-level drug dealer.”