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Trump’s Opioid Plan and the Bones of the War on Drugs [PSMag.com]

 

Throughout his insurgent campaign for the presidency, Donald Trump spoke about the nation’s growing opioid epidemic, vowing to “stop the flow of illegal drugs into the country.” While these statements aligned with President Trump’s unsurprisingly tough stance on immigration, they also spoke to the real concerns of many rural, white voters who broke for Trump in states like Maine and West Virginia. On Wednesday, Trump appeared to make good on his promises to those voters, announcing that he will create a commission to address opioid addiction, an initiative to be led by New Jersey Governor Chris Christie. The commission’s primary task, Trump said, will be to prepare a report on the state of the issue, and to offer recommendations for how the government can respond.

This disappointed drug policy experts who see the commission as a retread of Surgeon General Vivek H. Murthy’s landmark report on addiction. The report, the first of its kind from the Surgeon General’s Office, attracted widespread media attention for proposing major changes to government drug policy when it was released last December. Previously, government policies often exacerbated the issue by ignoring modern scientific understandings of drug abuse. Ignoring that report and starting from scratch is a disheartening approach to an urgent issue — thousands of people die each year from opioid overdoses, and the number is rising.



[For more of this story, written by Krish Lingala, go to https://psmag.com/trumps-opioi...n-drugs-9a96442f93bf]

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