Trump Speeks on Opioid Crisis

President Trump took the stage today to deliver a speech on combating the opioid crisis at the 2019 Rx Drug Abuse and Heroin Summit. While combating the crisis has been deemed a key issue by the administration, it has been one of the least focused on so far during the president’s time in office. However, with yesterday’s charging of a major drug distributor and its former CEO it would appear that things are beginning to ramp up on actually dealing with the crisis. While the opioid crisis was the focus of the speech, he did make correlations to how the efforts at the border are also key in combating the issue.

1. Trump began the speech by patting his administration on the back for its security efforts at the border, including the potential southern border wall, for being a great deterrent for drug smuggling. “In the past two years Customs and Border Protection seized, of meth and cocaine and heroin and fentanyl at the southern border are up 45%. They’re going up much higher. We are seizing it all over. You probably saw the numbers today. We are detaining, capturing, call it anything you want, more people than ever before.” He continued talking about how the border wall will add even more benefits saying, “soon we’re going to have a wall that’s very powerful,” and, “it will have a tremendous impact on drugs coming into our country.”

2. The president then went on to applaud the results the bipartisan criminal justice reform bill, the First Step Act, that provides drug addiction treatments to those in prison. He boasted that, “in just four months, more than 16,000 inmates are participating in new drug treatment,” and how beneficial the program is for those to be successful when they have finished serving their sentence.

3. Drug pricing was another major point. The issue has long been a problem and many people not are not able to afford the medication they need. Unfortunately it doesn’t tend to be simple antibiotics, but rather medications for serious medical issues that can cost tens of thousands of dollars a month. Trump took aim at US drug companies for pricing their drugs cheaper overseas and claiming they are “rigging the system.”