The Department of Justice is making a new push to halt the rise of opioid overdoses and addictions, according to Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein.
“We are confident that we can achieve that. We don’t need to accept the continued upward curve,” Rosenstein said Wednesday at a conference for America’s Health Insurance Plans in Washington, D.C.
Rosenstein was referring to fatalities from opioid overdoses, which resulted in more than 42,000 deaths in 2016, an increase from more than 33,000 deaths in 2015 and triple the number of deaths in 1999. The epidemic, which the Trump administration has named as a top priority, is driven largely by overdoses from illegal drugs like heroin and fentanyl, and also from prescription painkillers like oxycodone.
Rosenstein said the Department of Justice would use “all available tools” to hold people accountable on opioids. He cited the examples of going after drug traffickers, online sellers, and pharmaceutical companies. The goal, Rosenstein said, was to reduce access to illicit drugs, which would “drive up the price of illicit drugs and reduce the purity and addictiveness.” Doctors were also responsible for over-prescribing painkillers he said.
“The misuse contradicts the fundamental pledge of the medical professions: ‘First do no harm.’ Those drugs have caused a lot of collateral damage,” he said.
It may not be clear immediately whether the new effort works. Mortality data is collected as one of the roles of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, and the results from each year are typically not available until two years later as data scientists continue to review state information and collect it for analysis.
The Trump administration is expected to launch a media campaign to educate the public about the dangers of opioids and how to seek treatment, and HHS has encouraged states to propose changes to Medicaid that would allow more people to receive coverage for treatment facilities.
