I'd Like to Say a Word for

David Brooks, or at least his latest column. I'm almost never a fan but he gets this right:

If we lived in a normal country the Trump White House would launch a major initiative to combat opiate addiction. There are roughly two and a half million Americans addicted to opioids. Between 1999 and 2015, the number of those who died rose from 8,200 annually to 33,000. That means that over two years more Americans died of opiate addiction than died in the entire Vietnam War.

As Christopher Caldwell pointed out in a powerful essay called “American Carnage” in First Things, the opioid crisis is killing at a higher rate than crack or any other recent plague. At the peak of the crack epidemic there were about two deaths per 100,000 Americans. Today, the opioid epidemic is killing 10.3 per 100,000.

The national spotlight has been put on this crisis, but the situation is getting worse, not better. The Washington Post reported that in Stark County, Ohio, for example, the number of opioid-related deaths has increased by 20 percent in the past year. The county just asked the state to send over a cold storage trailer because the morgue is already full.

Of course there is a big portion of his party that just thinks this is goodbye and good riddance, but this is an issue Trump promised action on, and I think it would have a lot of bipartisan support.

Brooks:

... Trump could propose legislation fully funding the Comprehensive Addiction and Recovery Act.

When that was passed, by overwhelming bipartisan majorities in 2016, the price tag was put at $1 billion. But only a portion of that has actually been appropriated.

Special focus could be put on adding treatment centers. According to a 2014 federal study, about 90 percent of those who met the criteria for a drug abuse disorder didn’t get treatment. Some live in counties where there are zero facilities.

If you care about this issue, I recommend the whole article.

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