By Bronte Price, PoliticKING
President Obama took on America’s rapidly growing heroin and prescription opioid epidemic on Tuesday, committing resources to go toward prevention and treatment. The president spoke about his plan to pivot away from criminalizing addicts, toward treating their addiction as a health problem. “For too long we’ve viewed drug addiction through the lens of criminal justice,” Obama said at a conference in Atlanta. “The most important thing to do is reduce demand. And the only way to do that is to provide treatment – to see it as a public health problem and not a criminal problem.”
In 2014, nearly 21,000 deaths in the U.S. involved prescription opioids. Here's what @POTUS is doing about it: https://t.co/M2HgnDDN6a
— The White House (@WhiteHouse) March 29, 2016
Obama said he hoped that by participating in the National Prescription Drug Abuse Heroin Summit this week, he would draw attention to the shift in approach. The president pledged a series of efforts amounting to $116 million, directed toward treatment that the administration laid out earlier in the day.
“When I show up, usually cameras do too,” Obama said. “My hope is that it provides a greater spotlight to help solve this problem.”
The discussion was moderated by CNN chief medical correspondent Sanjay Gupta, who said that the aim of the panel was to “focus on a path forward, on solutions” to the problem. According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the epidemic claimed 28,647 lives in 2014, which is more than a 400% increase in opioid overdoses since 2000.
Watch as @POTUS discusses his next steps to address the opioid epidemic at the #RxSummit. https://t.co/NtSxIlepDM
— The White House (@WhiteHouse) March 29, 2016
The plan introduced by Obama includes $94 million in “new funding” which was released by the department of health and human services earlier this month. Now, at least 271 community health centers are able to expand “medication-assisted treatment of opioid use disorders in underserved communities.” Because of this funding, the centers now have the potential to treat 124,000 new patients, according to the White House. The plan also included $11 million for states to distribute naloxone, which is a drug that reverses opioid overdoses.
Obama explained the importance of the shift in approach toward the issue. “It was a seen as a character flaw, and ‘not our problem’,” he said. “But the way we have looked at cigarettes as a public health problem, and traffic fatalities as a public health problem, if you take the same approach here, it can make a difference.”
Watch as Dr. Damon Raskin of the Cliffside Malibu addiction treatment facility explains the reality of the heroin epidemic:
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