Kimberly Moreno/The Washington Post)
After months and months of debate, and a week of testimony at a presidential hearing, the federal government in 2015 will finally adopt a comprehensive and comprehensive federal program to fight opioid addiction. A bipartisan group of members of Congress led by Sens. Pat Toomey (R-Pa.) and Richard Blumenthal (D-Conn.) are proposing a comprehensive strategy that puts state and local governments in charge of dealing with an epidemic that has seen a spate of deadly overdoses among young people.
“The opioid epidemic that is consuming the nation is a problem no one should be ignoring,” the senators wrote in a letter to President Obama last Thursday. “Our bipartisan legislation should begin to address the root causes of this epidemic, by creating a nationwide strategy that improves access to naloxone and the availability of treatment options for those in crisis.”
[Congressional letter: Opioid crisis should fall in federal hands]
“The opioid epidemic is a public health emergency that demands a national effort to address this epidemic and ensure that those most affected, including the people most at risk, have access to the quality of life they deserve. We know the best, most effective way to reduce the amount of heroin and opioid use is to provide treatment options for those people suffering from the disease,” the senators wrote.
The legislation, introduced this spring, would create something like a nationwide strategy for opioid abuse. And it would require states to fund addiction treatment and to have in place a statewide plan requiring the local government to intervene where opioid users go before using drugs. So far, only New York (where 21 percent of the people who died of poisoning related to opioids over the last decade had been heroin users), New Jersey (24 percent) and Connecticut (23 percent) have taken steps to develop and implement a nationwide strategy. That’s a failure rate of 12.9 percent, which means at least 16 percent of drug overdose deaths, which include heroin and fentanyl, happened in states without such action plans.
“This legislation is a first step because it recognizes the reality that we have two crises of enormous magnitude, just as there have been many crises in the past,” Toomey said in a statement Sunday, adding that he and Blumenthal also plan to take up legislation to protect medical marijuana patients under the Drug Enforcement Administration. “We have to bring these two crises under control and stop the drug warriors from engaging in this kind of racialized drug war