Posted on 01/20/2022 7:01:10 PM PST by UMCRevMom@aol.com
A year into Biden's presidency, we're only burying more overdose victims © U.S. Attorneys Office for Utah via AP, File
In 1999, there were just under 20,000 fatal overdoses. Now, overdose deaths are five times higher—over 100,000 in the 12 months ending May 2021, according to the CDC’s most recent, tragically delayed, data.
As a member of the 2017 President’s Commission on Combating Drug Addiction and the Opioid Crisis and a national addiction recovery advocate who worked hard to elect the Biden/Harris ticket, respectively, we had front-row seats to the Trump administration’s failure to properly address this crisis. When Joe Biden took office, our hopes were high. But nearly a year after the administration change, things have not improved. Not by a long shot.
What we’re lacking is a strategic coordinated response across the federal government that doesn’t just tout small incremental changes as “progress.” Biden must urgently set ambitious goals to reverse the trend of fatal overdoses, invoke every power of the executive branch, and use a powerful bully pulpit to drive change. A new strategy should focus on four key areas. ADVERTISEMENT
The first is emergency actions and declarations. Our streets are being flooded with a poisoned drug supply. Consequently, President Biden and his administration should also be flooding streets with needed overdose response resources and taking aggressive action to shut down illicit fentanyl mills here at home and abroad.
While the Trump administration declared a Public Health Emergency for opioids (which has since been renewed multiple times), prior to COVID-19, the Public Health Emergency Fund had almost no resources the federal government could use to fund a response. Now, however, the fund has significant resources the Biden administration could swiftly utilize. Leaders should also broaden this declaration to apply to, at minimum, all substance use disorders, given that the overdose crisis extends well beyond opioids. We would recommend expanding the emergency to all mental health and substance use disorders, due to very high comorbidity rates and the devastating mental health crisis currently facing our youth.
The most powerful tool would be triggering emergency declarations for states under the Stafford Disaster Relief and Emergency Assistance Act, an action that was recommended to President Trump by the Opioid Commission in 2017. Though the Act has historically been summoned for natural disasters, its authority has also been used to great effect during the pandemic. In fact, FEMA has already provided tens of billions of dollars of emergency COVID aid to states. These same mechanisms could be used to immediately get money to state and local governments to respond to the overdose crisis with fentanyl test strips, sterile syringe programs, mobile crisis response teams, recovery community and harm reduction organizations, and more.
President Biden should also facilitate naloxone in all public places—just like first aid kits and AEDs—and press the FDA to make the drug available over the counter. After all, the agency expressed support for doing this nearly three years ago.
The second focus area must be insurance parity for mental health and substance use disorders. It is essential that we decrease our reliance on short-term, band-aid “solutions” and think big picture. Case in point: the recently announced “unprecedented” harm reduction grant program to “address the nation’s substance use and overdose epidemic.” The program only offers $30 million to be distributed over three years—nowhere near what it would take to truly address a public health crisis of this magnitude.
We don’t rely on cumbersome grant programs to treat cancer or COVID-19. Instead, we make sure our health care financing systems reimburse for providing needed treatment services. For mental health and addiction, this means fully enforcing the Mental Health Parity and Addiction Equity Act of 2008 to eliminate wrongful denials of coverage that too often stop people from getting help. Labor Secretary Marty Walsh has been taking aggressive action to do just that in employer-sponsored plans. We look forward to the administration following suit for Medicaid and marketplace plans, which disproportionately cover individuals at higher risk of overdose.
The third focus area must be increasing access to medication-assisted treatment (MAT). While the administration has taken steps to loosen a requirement that limits the prescribing of buprenorphine, a lifesaving medication to treat opioid addiction, the president has not forcefully declared his support for bills in Congress to eliminate the requirement entirely—despite campaign promises.
The fourth and final focus area must be strong leadership at the federal level. The president should take decisive action to cut across agency siloes, pressure Congress to make necessary statutory changes, and guide state and local governments.
We desperately need a primetime address on mental health and addiction—and a firm personal commitment to take charge. When the overdose death rate crossed 100,000 for the first time in November, Biden missed a critical opportunity by only issuing a written statement.
The administration must also walk the talk when it comes to public health updates and the dissemination of information. Dr. Anthony Fauci should be discussing the mental health and addiction fallout from COVID-19 on a regular basis, and mental health experts such as Dr. Raul Gupta, director of the Office of National Drug Control Policy, should be known to the American public. Visibility matters.
Every day that passes, we sacrifice more and more Americans to the highly treatable brain disease of addiction. Too many families are burying their loved ones due to a lack of a coordinated response from our elected leaders. The roadmap to confront this crisis is clear. President Biden, we implore you to use it.
Former U.S. Rep. Patrick J. Kennedy, founder of The Kennedy Forum, was lead author of the Mental Health Parity and Addiction Equity Act. He currently co-chairs the National Action Alliance for Suicide Prevention’s Mental Health & Suicide Prevention National Response to COVID-19 (National Response) and the Bipartisan Policy Center’s Behavioral Health Integration Task Force. Ryan Hampton is a nationally recognized recovery advocate, community organizer, and person in long-term recovery from addiction. He is the author of "Unsettled: How the Purdue Pharma Bankruptcy Failed the Victims of the American Overdose Crisis."
For the globalists, the right people are dying. So it will continue.
That wide open border probably isn’t helping.
The Hill did all they could to get President Trump out of office. They own some of the blame.
Powerful politicians don’t care because A) Fentanyl come from their red chinese paymasters and b) it mostly effects poorer white people.
I live in poor Appalachia. Overdose deaths had decimated my area.
Hillbilly heroin
‘...the fund has significant resources the Biden administration could swiftly utilize... .’
The Biden administration is ineffective.
In 2016, at age 56, I had both hips replaced, a genetic trait my family carries. Unwittingly, I was on oxycotin one year prior to the first surgery, and another 6 months till the second surgery, and then 6 months afterwards. To my naive astonishment, I was addicted and had severe withdrawals from oxy/hydro, to the point of craving the stuff. People in chronic pain do unbelievable things to curb the pain. I even raided someone’s medicine cabinet once, looking for the stuff.
Addiction does not discriminate. Nonetheless, it pains me that Trump’s name is even in this editorial because I think he tried. Biden is limping along.
Despair and depression brought on by Democrap pandemic paranoia.
COVID deaths, all of them.
/s
or maybe not /s
The DEA has shut down hundreds of pain clinics, prescription opioids are at 20 year lows and most deaths are from illicit fentanyl.
“In fact, from 2012 to 2021, overdose deaths soared from 41,000 to 100,000, with most deaths now resulting from illegal synthetic opioids — fentanyl and its analogs.”
“A recent study of more than 100,000 patients receiving opioids long-term for pain sought to determine the effects of tapering. The results were shocking. The authors found a 68 percent increase in overdoses and a doubling of mental health crises in tapered versus non-tapered patients.”
“We conclude that the CDC was at fault for failing to correct the miscoding of IMF. Finally, we briefly discuss some of the public policy consequences of this error, the misguided focus by public health and safety officials on pharmaceutical opioids, their prescribers and users, and the pressing necessity for the CDC to reassess how it measures and reports drug-involved mortality.”
Even the DEA admitted that 4/10 street pills with fentanyl have toxic doses of fentanyl.
https://www.dea.gov/press-releases/2021/09/27/dea-issues-public-safety-alert
“Anyone filling a prescription at a licensed pharmacy can be confident that the medications they receive are safe when taken as directed by a medical professional
Thank you for bringing those important facts to the thread.
Paid for by the ‘Biden and whats her name 2024!’ Election committee to re-steal the Presidency!
“We’ve gots alot more destroying to do!”
I’m wondering who forced these people to take the drugs that killed them. Or is it just with this article that people discovered that taking opiates could kill you and no one knew of the danger. It seems to me that blaming the drugs that people take is like blaming the gun that a suicide uses.
The opioid crisis is different than other drug issues because it destroyed a lot of normals who were victims of overzealous doctors prescribing opioid painkillers; several have gone to jail for it for profiteering as pill-pushers. Imagine getting over-prescribed for some condition, and when the prescription runs out you’re addicted - and destroy yourself and those around you substituting illegal drugs for them. Many of the users involved here were very normal people; these weren’t glue-sniffers moving on up...
Doubtless true for some of them, but I suspect the majority were just junkies who got too hot a shot. I’m not up on the latest form of drugs, but it’s my understanding that fentanyl is injected not taken orally, so it’s kind of hard for me to understand how one goes from pill popping to hard line injecting without some culpability and the exercise of free will
“Recreational” use of drugs is a CHOICE. Bad choices frequently have bad outcomes. No sympathy from these quarters.
That does NOT apply to those for whom the drugs were prescribed, of course. Only those who take them for “fun”.
The basic problem is that many were needlessly addicted to drugs by “legitimate” doctors after work/car accidents or surgeries (and some of those doctors were jailed for pushing it), and end up with no doctors willing to keep the drugs coming so they search elsewhere. Heroin in particular was popular for this.
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