Fight against addiction costs money

Editorial by Fayetteville Observer, published in Burlington Times-News, November 9, 2017.

Fayetteville continues to gather the right kind of headlines in the battle against opioid addiction. We learned this week that the city will join nine other communities around the country in an innovative opioid mapping project. New America, a Washington think tank, wants to put real faces on statistics, mapping the locations of opioid-overdose deaths and marking them with the victims’ faces.

The project will also include interactive analytics, data sharing and collaboration on developing the most effective strategies for efforts against opioid addiction, which now takes more American lives every year than guns and car accidents. The city was chosen for the program because it has become a national leader and innovator in the struggle against addiction.

The announcement of the mapping project comes a week after Gov. Roy Cooper visited the city for a firsthand look at a law-enforcement program that diverts addicts from the legal system and places them instead in a more stable environment that includes housing and treatment for their addiction. While he was here, the governor also announced that the state is distributing 40,000 doses of Naloxone, an overdose-reversal drug, to agencies around the state that deal with addicts. The Fayetteville Police Department was one of the first in the country to equip all of its patrol officers with the drug, which has saved about 70 lives in Fayetteville so far this year.

Cooper is a member of President Trump’s bipartisan commission on the opioid crisis, which issued dozens of recommendations last week. The measures included more rigid opioid prescription guidelines, prevention and treatment programs, law enforcement tactics and other new strategies. The president also recently declared the opioid epidemic a national health emergency.

All of those measures have merit, but they’re missing a critical element: Money. Nobody is talking about how the nation will fund all these efforts. When the president declared the public-health emergency in late October, the federal Public Health Emergency Fund had a $57,000 balance — not enough to get one addict through rehab. And we’re talking about millions of people who need help.

In North Carolina, lawmakers last summer added $5 million to the state budget for opioid addiction treatment. That’s a small drop in a big bucket. This state has four cities in the national top-20 addiction hot spots. Fayetteville ranks 18th. Wilmington, Hickory and Jacksonville are ahead of us. Just among those four communities, there are nearly 40,000 people fighting addiction. The total across the state is likely to be considerably higher. But Fayetteville has only 41 inpatient addiction treatment beds. Many rural counties have none.

About 175 Americans are dying from opioid overdoses every day. If terrorists were killing that many of our citizens, the country would launch an all-out offensive and worry about the costs later. We need billions of dollars for prevention efforts alone — programs that include education and intervention that stop addictions before they begin. And we need millions more to find and treat the millions of addicts in communities large and small across the country.

We know that the nation’s War on Drugs, declared in 1971 by President Richard Nixon, has been a trillion-dollar failure. Interdiction efforts have largely been unsuccessful and so has the criminalizing of addicts, who suffer from a treatable illness. Many addiction experts have known this for decades, but it took this opioid epidemic, which is killing the children of lawmakers and public policy leaders, to open a search for a new approach to addiction.

With the opioid crisis commission’s report, we have new strategies and new approaches to deal with addiction. But they will be useless until we also have funding to put them in place. It’s time for the president and Congress to find the money. One hundred seventy-five Americans are dying every day we delay.

http://www.thetimesnews.com/opinion/20171109/editorial-fight-against-addiction-costs-money