FIGHTING THE OPIOID EPIDEMIC

A recent Op Ed in the Boston Globe caught my attention and I couldn’t resist sharing. If you want to know what we can and should do to truly fight the opioid epidemic, it provides the answers.

Here’s a summary of its recommendations for fighting the opioid epidemic: [1]

• To seriously tackle the opioid epidemic, the federal government needs to spend $4 – $5 billion a year on the effort for the next 10 years.
• Laws and regulations at the state and federal levels must ensure that health insurance covers addiction treatment, mental health services, and other services that will reduce opioid addiction and successfully treat those who experience addiction.
• Medicaid, the Affordable Care Act (aka Obama Care), and perhaps other initiatives need to ensure that as many Americans as possible have health insurance to pay for treatment.
• Through oversight and research, addiction treatment must be as effective as possible.
• Pharmaceutical corporations must be held accountable, financially and otherwise, for their significant role in creating the opioid addiction crisis. They should be required to make substantial contributions to treatment costs, including making addiction-related medications available and affordable.
• Federal laws and regulations should prohibit direct-to-consumer marketing of prescription drugs. Only one other country in the world allows this and it is a relatively recent phenomenon in the U.S. The big pharmaceutical corporations spend over $5 billion a year advertising drugs, increasing sales but leading to inappropriate use and overuse of drugs.
• Everyone, in the public sector and in private life, should address addiction as a health and public health problem, not a criminal justice issue, and should work to de-stigmatize it.
• The federal government needs to increase the effectiveness of efforts to reduce the smuggling of opioids into the country, including diplomatic efforts with Mexico and China, particularly focused on stopping the flow of Fentanyl into the U.S.

[1]      Tamasi, R.V., 1/22/18, “How to fight the opioid epidemic,” The Boston Globe