A group of U.S. Senators, including Joe Manchin, Sherrod Brown and others, have urged President Trump to re-declare opioids as a public health emergency, claiming that there has not been enough action on the matter since it was initiated on October 26, 2017.
Trump’s emergency declaration expired on January 23, 2018, according to the senators’ letter. “We have seen too little action taken relative to the magnitude of the problem and urge you to immediately renew the opioid public health emergency declaration,” it reads. “It is critical that we immediately take every possible step and use every tool at our disposal to work to end this crisis.”
In the past there have been bipartisan efforts to address to opioid issue, such as the Comprehensive Addiction and Recovery (CARA) act of 2016. CARA is a sweeping bill that addresses “the full continuum of care from primary prevention to recovery support, including significant changes to expand access to addiction treatment services and overdose reversal medications,” according to the website of the American Society of Addiction Medicine.
The act involved federal restrictions on opioid prescriptions and the establishment of treatment to treat patients with opioid addictions, according to F. Stuart Leeds, assistant professor of family medicine at the Boonshoft School of Medicine. Nevertheless, opioid usage has persisted in recent years.
The Center for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) released data showing that over 42,000 people died due to opioid-related overdoses in 2016. That number is a 28 percent increase in overdose deaths from the year before, and five times higher than the number from 1999.
CDC data also shows that, on average, about 115 people in the United States die every day from opioid overdoses.
The U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) website claims that drug overdoses are the leading cause of injury death in the United States. Opioid usage constitutes 66 percent of those overdose deaths, according to the CDC website.
In March of 2016, the CDC for the first time issued a comprehensive opioid prescribing guide, which was an unprecedented turning point for the organization, according to Leeds.
A great number of overdose deaths in recent years can be attributed to ready availability of cheap black tar heroin from Mexico and the influx of fentanyl. Fentanyl is a pure synthetic drug that is often used as analgesia in medical procedures. It is about 88 percent times more potent than morphine.
Data from 2016 revealed that out of about 4,000 deaths, about 2,400 were attributed to fentanyl and 340 to carfentanil, according to Leeds. “Some level of fentanyl was detected in the blood of 90 percent of these overdose victims,” he said.
