President Donald Trump knows America has an opioid problem. But it’s not clear that he knows what to do about it.
Speaking at roundtable discussion of the opioid epidemic Tuesday, the president decried mass addiction as “a tremendous problem in our country” that his administration will “get taken care of as well as it can be taken care of.”
But outside of beefing up drug enforcement, Trump offered no practical steps on what his administration would do to combat the problem. He began with this vague meditation:
“The best way to prevent drug addiction and overdose is to prevent people from abusing drugs in the first place,” Trump said. “If they don’t start, they won’t have a problem. If they do start, it’s awfully tough to get off. So if we can keep them from going on and maybe by talking to youth and telling them: No good, really bad for you in every way. But if they don’t start, it will never be a problem.”
The president is correct that preventing new addictions is an integral part of combatting the opioid crisis. According to the American Society of Addiction Medicine, 2 million Americans are abusing prescription painkillers and 591,000 were hooked on heroin in 2015. Drug overdose has become America’s leading cause of accidental death.
But what is to be done for Americans already hooked on opioids? Here Trump’s solution is beefed up enforcement and prosecution of drug crime.
“Opioid overdose deaths have nearly quadrupled since 1999,” Trump said. “It’s a problem, the likes of which we have never seen. Meanwhile the overall drug prosecutions have gone down in recent years. At the end of 2016, there were 23 percent fewer federal prosecutions than in 2011, so they looked at this surge and they let it go by. We’re not letting it go by.”
Taking increased action against heroin dealers is an admirable goal. But more than 80 percent of America’s opioid addicts are abusing prescription opioids, most of which were originally legally prescribed. Who do you prosecute when a kid sneaks the pain pills a doctor gave his mom?
“We’re going to have a tremendous team of experts and people that want to beat this horrible situation that has happened in our country—and we will,” Trump said. “We will win. We have no alternative. We have to win for our youth.”
Let’s hope that Trump’s team of experts can come up with a few more ideas.
