President Obama said race and economic status have made it difficult in the past to put an emphasis on the treatment of opioid addicts.
Obama outlined several proposals during a speech Tuesday in Atlanta in the National Rx Drug Abuse & Heroin Summit. The proposals reflected a shift in the White House to emphasis treatment of addicts rather than locking them up.
“Part of what has made it difficult to emphasize treatment over the criminal justice system has to do with the fact that the populations affected were viewed as, or stereotypically identified as poor, minority,” Obama said. “As a consequence, the thinking was it is often a character flaw in those individuals who live in those communities and it’s not our problem, they are being locked up.”
One of the things that changed in the debate is “a recognition this reaches everybody,” Obama said.
He said later during the event that if heroin reaches an inner city such as in Baltimore, then “it’s not going to take that long” before it reaches more affluent suburbs.
He then noted that even his two daughters, who attend an elite private school in the District of Columbia, are just as likely to get access to illegal substances.
“They are just less likely to get in trouble or get thrown in jail and have a permanent felony record than the kids who live in those inner cities,” he said.
Obama said the federal government would continue to fight drug traffickers and the steady stream of heroin and synthetic opioids that are coming across the Mexican border.
“We are staying on cutting off the pathways for these drugs coming in,” Obama said.
But the president added that “what we have to recognize is in this global economy of ours that the most important thing we can do is to reduce demand for drugs. The only way we reduce demand is if we are providing treatment and thinking of this as a public health problem and not just a criminal problem.”
Obama then shifted to the need for further funding for treatment, which has become a subject of debate in Congress. Obama recently asked for an extra $1.1 billion in his latest budget for fighting the opioid crisis that claims 72 Americans a day from opioid and heroin abuse.
“Treatment is greatly underfunded. It is particularly underfunded in a lot of rural areas,” Obama said.
The administration outlined several procedures that aim to increase the prescribing of the addiction treatment buprenorphine and boost mental health services offered by Medicaid.
