America’s drug overdose crisis is out of control. Washington, despite a bipartisan desire to combat it, is finding its addiction-fighting programs are failing.
In 2018, Republicans, Democrats and then-President Donald Trump united around legislation that threw $20 billion into treatment, prevention and recovery. But five years later, the SUPPORT Act has lapsed and the number of Americans dying from overdoses has grown more than 60 percent, driven by illicit fentanyl. The battle has turned into a slog.
Even though 105,000 Americans died last year, Congress is showing little urgency about reupping the law since it expired on Sept. 30. That’s not because of partisan division, but a realization that there are no quick fixes a new law could bring to bear.
Aiming to expand access to treatment, Congress in December eliminated the waiver and training requirements physicians needed to prescribe buprenorphine, which helps patients stop taking fentanyl. The Drug Enforcement Administration recently extended eased pandemic rules for prescribing it via telemedicine through the end of 2024.
A bipartisan group of representatives focused on mental health and substance use has proposed more than 70 bills this Congress to fight the overdose crisis, but none of them has inspired the kind of urgency lawmakers showed five years ago when they packaged bills into one landmark package: the SUPPORT Act.
The law’s expiration on Oct. 1 means states are no longer required to cover all of the FDA-approved treatments for opioid use disorder through Medicaid but public health advocates don’t expect any state to drop that coverage.
Might be time to stop prescribing painkillers that used to be for palliative care to people with tooth aches.
At the absolute bare minimum make Purdue Pharma pay for aftercare to make sure the patient doesn’t have withdrawals or turns to illicit use.
The only way a one time fine makes sense, is if they stop profiting from it.
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We did that, that’s part of how we got here.
The people that were already addicted (not to fentanyl, mind you. More to the likes of Vicodin, oxycontin, etc.) turned to street vendors because we didn’t offer them any support to get off the drugs. Used to be they got heroin. Then, the street vendors more and more were cutting fentanyl into other painkillers to cut costs as demand and tolerances crept higher and higher. That’s how these overdoses happen; many of those that suffer a fentanyl overdose didn’t know that they were using fentanyl. Even if they do know what they’re using, the difference between an overdose and living another day is less than a milligram of the stuff. Better hope whoever cut it had the tools and wits to be extremely precise about it.
Rest assured though, it’s far more difficult now to be prescribed any clean, government regulated painkiller beyond ibuprofen even with a legitimate short-term use case.
It’s still not that difficult to get opiate prescriptions in the us.