President should declare national opioid emergency

If anyone continues to harbor any doubts about the epic destructiveness of the opioid-overdose epidemic ravaging this nation, one quick glance at preliminary findings from a presidential commission should smack them into reality with some enlightening yet chilling perspectives. To wit:

Every three weeks, America’s opioid epidemic snuffs out the lives of as many people who perished in the Sept. 11 terror attacks on our nation.

Between 1999 and 2015, more than 560,000 people in this country died from drug overdoses – mostly heroin and prescription opiates. That number surpasses the entire population of Atlanta.

Only a paltry 10 percent of the nearly 21 million self-reporting U.S. citizens with a substance-use disorder receive any specialized treatment whatsoever.

Those and other pieces of sobering data serve as a preface to the interim report of the Commission on Combating Drug Addiction and the Opioid Crisis released last week. The five-member bipartisan panel, led by New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie, was appointed by President Donald J. Trump in late March.

Its charge was to study the scope and effectiveness of the federal response to the opioid crisis and to make recommendations to the president for improving that response. It is working closely with the White House Office of American Innovation led by Jared Kushner.

Thus far, four months into its tenure, the commission is to be commended for demonstrating the urgency of its task by making some noteworthy progress. According to its interim report, the panel has taken testimony from nine leading nonprofit organizations dealing with addiction, took input from more than 50 organizations and reviewed more than 8,000 comments from the public.

Based on that initial input, the commission released a preliminary report and set of recommendations (Its full report is expected later this fall).

Clearly, unlike so many other fanciful-sounding government committees, commissions, focus groups and task forces that have given only the appearance of tackling a gnawing socio-economic crisis, this commission has made it clear it means business.

Its first and most urgent order of business has come in the form of a direct appeal to our nation’s chief executive: “Declare a national emergency under the Public Health Service Act or the Stafford Act.”

The president should swiftly act on that well-reasoned recommendation.

PRACTICAL IMPACT OF DECLARATION

The Vindicator has advocated precisely that action in the past. In early April of this year, in fact, we called on state and/or federal governments to declare a state of emergency over the opiate scourge in the Mahoning Valley, Ohio and the United States.

“It’s sorely needed immediately to rein in the out-of-control menace that has overwhelmed and paralyzed those on the front lines fighting it,” we argued in this space April 10.

The practical impact of such a declaration could be significant in freeing up needed resources, dispatching additional resources and cutting red tape that slows relief efforts. After all, each day lost in fighting the epidemic produces an additional 142 overdose deaths.

Though the declaration of emergency stands as the centerpiece recommendation of the panel, its members also crafted many other credible suggestions. Among them:

Rapidly increase treatment capacity for addicts by eliminating barriers to Medicaid-financed treatment of the mentally ill in all 50 states. The commission targeted this recommendation as the single fastest way to increase treatment availability across the nation.

Mandate educational iniatives for opiate prescribers to reduce the supply of the drugs.

Craft model legislation for states requiring the prescribing of naloxone alongside any high-risk opioid prescriptions and equipping all law-enforcement agencies in the U.S. with the life-saving heroin antidote.

As the panel concludes its evidence gathering toward compilation of its final report, we hope it also puts a premium on strategies to ensure rapid deployment of resources to the most serious centers of the epidemic, which, of course, includes the hard-hit Mahoning Valley.

We also hope the nation responds to the emergency, much in the way that it responded 16 years ago to the 9/11 emergency – with unity of purpose and steely resolve to defeat this vile agent of mass destruction.