The consensus from experts and advocates: “a lot of talk, little action.”
By German Lopez@germanrlopezgerman.lopez@vox.com Jan 23, 2018, 8:00am EST
If you listen to President Donald Trump’s words about the opioid epidemic, he seems to understand it’s an emergency. He declared it as one late in 2017. And he has repeatedly promised, as president and on the campaign trail, that he will do something about it — that he would “spend the money,” and that “the number of drug users and the addicted will start to tumble downward over a period of years.”
If you look at Trump’s actions, well, it’s a very different story. There has been no move by Trump’s administration to actually spend more money on the opioid crisis. Key positions in the administration remain unfilled, even without nominees in the case of the White House’s drug czar office and the Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA). And although Trump’s emergency declaration was renewed last week, it has led to essentially no action since it was first signed — no significant new resources, no major new initiatives.
Chuck Ingoglia, a senior vice president at the National Council for Behavioral Health, which advocates on addiction issues, summarized the general takeaway of experts and advocates: “A lot of talk, little action. It’s great that the president says this is a priority. It’s great that he convened a task force so we have another paper that says the opioid crisis in America needs attention. But too little has happened to actually do anything about it.”
For experts and advocates, this is hard to understand. Taking action on the opioid epidemic could have been an easy win. It’s an issue that crosses partisan lines, with both Democrats and Republicans angling to do something about it. There’s evidence it’s very relevant to Trump’s own base. While experts talk about needing as much as tens of billions of dollars for the crisis over the next few years, that’s actually not much in federal budget terms — a fraction of a percent for a government that spends trillions a year.
And yet the Trump administration has barely budged. Beyond declaring a public health emergency, the administration has done little to nothing to combat the crisis.
That’s not because the crisis is getting better. In 2016, the latest year with a full official count, there were nearly 64,000 drug overdose deaths in the US — an all-time high. The rise in drug overdose deaths was a big reason that life expectancy fell for the second year in a row in the US, which had not happened since the early 1960s. And the early data suggests that 2017 was worse: According to preliminary figures from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, there were nearly 67,000 drug overdose deaths in the 12-month period through June 2017, up from more than 57,000 in the 12-month period through June 2016.
If the worst trends continue, Stat forecast that as many as 650,000 people will die within the next decade — the equivalent of the entire population of Baltimore.
This is the reality facing Trump, the reality in which his administration has responded with next to nothing.
Read more
https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2018/1/23/16909984/trump-opioid-epidemic-2017
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