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President Trump on Thursday declared the opioid epidemic in America “a public health emergency,” acting on his campaign promise to address the crisis.
In a speech at the White House, Trump said that the declaration will provide for expanded access to medical services and relief for states.
He added that the government would be banning a specific opioid immediately “that is truly evil” and that his administration would be “looking at the potential of the federal government bringing major lawsuits against bad actors.”
He said that the FDA will be requiring prescribers to have “special training” for safe opioid prescribing and that there would soon be a campaign that will “put faces to the danger of opioid abuse.”
Other solutions will be implemented once he receives a final report from his Presidential Commission on Combating Drug Addiction and the Opioid Crisis, which will include requiring certain companies to only provide 7-day supplies of prescriptions and collaboration with companies to create non-addictive pain killers.
Trump said that the U.S. Postal Service and U.S. Customs and Border Protection are strengthening their inspection of packages to prevent drugs from entering or spreading throughout the country.
He went on to say that he would soon be speaking with the president of China about drug trafficking.
“This is a worldwide problem, this crisis of drug use, addiction, and overdose deaths,” he said. “Addressing it will require all of our effort and it will require us to confront the crisis in all of its very real complexity.”
Trump said that in 2016, the U.S. lost nearly 64,000 people to opioid overdose, that 11 million people used prescription opioids, and that at least 1 million used heroin.
“Drug overdoses are now the leading causes of unintentional death in the United States by far,” he said. “More people are dying from drug overdoses today than from gun homicides and motor vehicles combined.”
“These overdoses are driven by a massive increase in addiction to prescription pain killers, heroin, and other opioids.”
The President said the U.S. is the largest consumer of these drugs “by far.”
He called drug addiction a “plague” that’s spread across the country, in city and rural areas.
"This epidemic is a national health emergency,” he said. "It is time to liberate our communities from this scourge of drug addiction... We can be the generation that ends the opioid epidemic."
The declaration will last for the duration of the nationwide public health emergency or 90 days.
According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, overdose deaths involving prescription opioids have quadrupled since 1999.
In 2015 alone, 33,091 people died from opioid overdose, 12.5 million people misused prescription opioids, and 828,000 people used heroin, according to the most recent statistics available from the Department of Health and Human Services.
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