Inaction + Funding Cuts = Sabotage
Washington, DC – After former Congressman Patrick Kennedy, a member of President Trump’s Opioid Commission, said this Administration’s “efforts to address the epidemic are tantamount to reshuffling chairs on the Titanic,” and other leading advocates spoke out against the Administration’s nonresponse, Protect Our Care Campaign Director Brad Woodhouse released the following statement:
“With members of Trump’s own commission decrying the President’s non-response to the raging opioid epidemic, Republicans must finally face up to this Administration’s failure to confront the nation’s most urgent health care crisis. Despite his campaign-trail promises, Trump has done worse than nothing: his attacks on the Affordable Care Act, Medicaid, and the Office of National Drug Control Policy are actively sabotaging Americans’ access to addiction treatment. Enough is enough: Congressional Republicans need to end their partisan war on health care, stand up against President Trump’s sabotage, and put their money where their mouths are on the opioid epidemic – or else admit that they are making this crisis worse.”
Opioid commission member: Our work is a ‘sham’
CNN // Wayne Drash and Nadia Kounang // January 23, 2018
The Republican-led Congress has turned the work of the president’s opioid commission into a “charade” and a “sham,” a member of the panel told CNN. “Everyone is willing to tolerate the intolerable — and not do anything about it,” said former Democratic Rep. Patrick Kennedy, who was one of six members appointed to the bipartisan commission in March. “I’m as cynical as I’ve ever been about this stuff.”
Trump has had a year to confront the opioid epidemic. He’s done almost nothing.
Vox // German Lopez // Jan 23, 2018, 8:00am
If you listen to President Donald Trump’s words about the opioid epidemic, he seems to understand it’s an emergency. He declared it as one late in 2017. And he has repeatedly promised, as president and on the campaign trail, that he will do something about it — that he would “spend the money,” and that “the number of drug users and the addicted will start to tumble downward over a period of years.” If you look at Trump’s actions, well, it’s a very different story. There has been no move by Trump’s administration to actually spend more money on the opioid crisis. Key positions in the administration remain unfilled, even without nominees in the case of the White House’s drug czar office and the Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA). And although Trump’s emergency declaration was renewed last week, it has led to essentially no action since it was first signed — no significant new resources, no major new initiatives.