Trump will call opioid epidemic national emergency

President Trump will officially declare the opioid epidemic a national emergency this Thursday.

It’s been more than two months since the president first used the term, and nothing to this point has happened. Axios says Trump will make a formal designation in an executive order and a speech later this week. 

First Lady Melania Trump has added the issue to her portfolio, visiting a West Virginia drug a treatment center two weeks ago in support of parents working to overcome addiction.

Opioid addiction was also the topic of Mrs. Trump’s first solo policy event since becoming first lady.

She held a roundtable at the White House on the national crisis at the end of September.

‘The well-being of children is of the utmost importance to me and I plan to use my platform as first lady to help as many kids as I can,’ she said. 

According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, a quarter of drug overdose deaths were caused by heroin in 2015, a 19 percent jump since 1999, CNN has reported.

President Trump labeled the epidemic an ’emergency’ from his golf club in Bedminster, New Jersey. The administration has spent the time since then putting together a national action plan.

Axios said Monday that the administration has plans to roll out a ‘massive advertising and public-relations campaign’ to combat the disease. It will be requesting funds from Congress for the effort.

A Washington Post report in August suggested a public health emergency designation would provide states in opioid hot spots with the opportunity to request and receive federal funds they can put toward to opioid abuse drug treatment efforts.

‘First, it lets states and localities that are designated disaster zones to access money in the federal Disaster Relief Fund, just like they could if they had a tornado or hurricane,’ Stanford University drug addition specialist Keith Humphreys said then. 

Humphreys said Trump could also issue temporary rule changes to allow the expansion of federal treatment programs and reimbursements through the use of waivers.

First Lady Melania Trump has added the issue to her portfolio, visiting a West Virginia drug a treatment center two weeks ago in support of parents working to overcome addiction

Trump is currently without a Health and Human Services secretary. He accepted his former secretary’s resignation after the federal official was caught in a private jet scandal. 

He is also without a drug czar. His first pick, Tom Marino, pulled his name from consideration last week after news outlets exposed a bill he pushed through Congress to be a significant drag on the Drug Enforcement Administration’s ability to crackdown on prescription drug abuse.

The president has not named new nominees to the posts.

Former HHS secretary Tom Price said after a briefing that Trump attended in August that he did not think the opioid abuse constituted a national emergency only to have the boss contradict him two days later. 

‘The opioid crisis is an emergency, and I’m saying officially right now it is an emergency,’ Trump said.

At the briefing, Trump took a slap at his predecessor, Democrat Barack Obama, for allowing the crisis to balloon on his watch.

Trump said, ‘At the end of 2016, there were 23 percent fewer federal prosecutions than in 2011. So they looked at this surge and they let it go by.

‘We’re not letting it go by. The average sentence for a drug offender decreased 20 percent from 2009 to 2016,’ the Republican president said.

He assessed that ‘the best way to prevent drug addiction and overdose is to prevent people from abusing drugs in the first place. If they don’t start, they won’t have a problem. If they do start, it’s awfully tough to get off.’

Trump came under scrutiny earlier this year for referring to New Hampshire, a state that he won, as ‘a drug-infested den.’ He blamed the problem on Mexico in a call that was leaked to that country’s president.