Trump's Action to Address the Crisis Caused by Opioid Drugs in America

On Thursday, Donald Trump's administration announced a public health emergency to combat the crisis caused by opioid drug use and will allocate more resources to this battle. According to statistics from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, over 140 Americans die every day due to high consumption of these drugs and narcotics. According to National Public Radio, the Trump administration is set to instruct health and emergency agency managers to reduce the number of deaths caused by opioid drug use. In August, Mr. Trump stated he wanted to declare a national emergency. Recently, he reaffirmed this promise, but the White House ultimately said that declaring a public health emergency is more appropriate than a national emergency. Meanwhile, some addiction experts, such as Dr. Andrew Kolodny, say that the government has fundamentally delayed its response to this issue. He adds that he expected the government to act quickly following Mr. Trump's August statement: "If an issue is an emergency, the responsible agencies are expected to respond very quickly." After taking office, Mr. Trump appointed a committee led by Chris Christie, the governor of New Jersey, to investigate the opioid crisis. In its initial report, the committee urged the president to declare a national emergency in this regard. Issuing this order could allocate more resources to treatment and provide access for those in need of medications to combat high drug consumption. In August, just days before the president promised to declare a national emergency, Health Secretary Tom Price stated that he did not believe such a declaration was necessary. Two months after this incident, Mr. Price resigned from the Health Department. Dr. Keith Humphreys, a psychiatry professor at Stanford University and an advisor to the Obama administration, says Tom Price was not supportive of addiction treatment programs. He adds: "When Tom Price was a member of Congress, he opposed a law that required insurance companies to cover addiction treatment. He did not believe in the heroin addiction treatment method using methadone prescriptions. Therefore, his departure from the Health Department is a positive development." This week, the head of the Food and Drug Administration reported to a congressional committee that the agency will begin to encourage and develop medication-assisted addiction treatment methods using methadone, buprenorphine, and naltrexone. This is an important decision because currently, some states do not cover the costs of some of these treatments. Advocates of these methods are waiting to see what the president will say on this matter. Currently, the U.S. Congress allocates $500 million annually to addiction treatment programs. Dr. Kolodny states that more funding is needed to help the 27 million Americans who use drugs and narcotics. He believes an appropriate figure is about $6 billion annually. Dr. Kolodny criticizes the Obama administration for its slow response to the opioid crisis. According to him, this critical situation began in 1996, and the CDC declared it an epidemic in 2011. Kathleen Sebelius, the Health Secretary in the Obama administration, agrees and says: "We probably did not take enough action. If we had recognized the scope and scale of the problem and its contributing factors years ago, it would have been effective. And perhaps we could have prevented many of the deaths caused by high drug consumption."