Donald Trump has declared the opioid crisis a public health emergency, but his response has nothing to do with public health:
The president now says that to combat opioids, he’s focused on enforcement, not treatment.
Trump spent just over a minute of his 80-minute State of the Union address talking about opioids. In a speech this week in Cincinnati, he had a few more comments. The opioid epidemic, he said, “has never been worse. People form blue ribbon committees. They do everything they can. And frankly, I have a different take on it. My take is you have to get really, really tough, really mean with the drug pushers and the drug dealers.”
It doesn’t sound like he’s talking about pharmaceutical companies and doctors there. It doesn’t sound like he’s thinking about addicts at all—in his scenario, do all the opioid addicts in the country just go cold turkey simultaneously? Hell, Trump doesn’t know and doesn’t care. He just wants to talk tough, and “really, really tough, really mean with the drug pushers” sounds bad-ass to him. Public health experts can go hang. Donald Trump knows what this public health emergency needs, and it’s more cops with more guns getting more “mean.”