Team Trump's war on drugs still infected with denial
It would take three additional doses at the hospital to completely revive him.
Denial and the war on drugs seem to go together. The Trump administration speaks with fire and fury about the plague of opiate addiction. But when it comes to action, Team Trump sounds feverishly unfocused.
For example, federal drug law since the early 1970s irrationally ranks marijuana as more dangerous and less medically useful than heroin and cocaine.
In October, Trump declared a 90-day public health emergency over the opioid crisis but did not make new funding available to address it. The budget Trump is set to release February 12 is expected to slash the drug office's funding and pass much of its responsibilities to the departments of Health and Human Services and Justice.
State and local law enforcement officials are fighting a Trump administration proposal to move the Office of National Drug Control Policy, also known as "the drug czar," which oversees the $275 million drug prevention program to the Justice Department. Such a shift, the crime fighters fear, could shift federal anti-drug efforts too much toward legal crackdowns and away from community-based social and psychological services.
And in a great leap backwards to the "Just Say No" policies of the Reagan era, Attorney General Jeff Sessions has announced a shift away from the Obama-era policy of allowing states to set their own marijuana policy. Change must come from Congress, he says. In the meantime, federal raids and busts will continue, regardless of what the states want to do.
At the same time, Team Trump has reduced funding to the drug czar's office. President Trump nominated Rep. Tom Marino, a Pennsylvania Republican, to serve as its director. But he withdrew after it was revealed that he had pushed for legislation to hamper the Drug Enforcement Administration's ability to go after over-prescribing pharmaceutical companies.
While that post still awaits an appointee, President Trump has chosen (drumroll please) White House counselor Kellyanne Conway to be his "opioid czar." Far more experienced at politics than public health, she has been criticized for nudging experienced drug policy experts aside in favor of an "opioid cabinet" of political staffers.
Meanwhile, to those of us who have been paying attention to the places where politics and medical science meet, the sad irony of the administration's currently chaotic drug policy is in the demographics of its victims. Pivotal swing-state voters who put Trump over the top in 2016 came disproportionately from the same heavily rural, economically distressed regions where the opiate carnage has been most severe.
The president should be president of all Americans, but he owes a particular obligation to those who voted for him in the hope that he would bring special attention to the opioid crisis and its root causes, particularly unscrupulous medical suppliers.
Unfortunately, it has been easier for Team Trump to set goals than figure out how to achieve them. Maybe they, like Officer Green once was, are still in denial, too.
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(E-mail Clarence Page at cpage@chicagotribune.com.)
(c) 2018 CLARENCE PAGE DISTRIBUTED BY TRIBUNE MEDIA SERVICES, INC.
