The White House’s new strategy for addressing the nation’s drug crisis calls for a number of consensus public health measures: the overdose-reversal medication naloxone, medication-assisted treatment, and test strips used to detect fentanyl or other drug supply adulterants.
But the May 4 document appears to run counter to many of the Trump administration’s latest drug policy actions. In particular, it comes just days after the administration issued new restrictions on using federal dollars to distribute test strips and warned against the use of medication-assisted treatment unless accompanied by other services, like counseling.
The document, issued each year by the White House Office of National Drug Control Policy, is the first to be released since the Senate confirmed Sara Carter, a former Fox News correspondent, to the role in January.
True to Carter’s roots reporting on cartel smuggling activity, and Republican politics more broadly, the document emphasizes hardline actions like construction of a wall along the Mexican border, deporting drug traffickers, and the targeting of alleged drug boats in the Caribbean, which experts argue is illegal.
Notably, the strategy makes no mention of syringe exchange, seen as an important tool in preventing infectious disease from injection drug use and offering low-barrier connections to medical treatment.
Consistent with the administration’s prior crackdowns on supervised consumption and test strips, the strategy does not use the phrase “harm reduction,” a strategy for helping reduce death and disease among people who use drugs, without demanding abstinence.
The administration has redirected resources “toward transitional housing and treatment-focused programs [and] removing the enabling environment that allowed open-air drug use to fester in our cities,” according to the strategy document.
To date, arguably the Trump administration’s most significant drug policy actions have come in diminishing the Substance Use and Mental Health Administration, for which the White House has never appointed a full-time leader.
It has also canceled billions in funding, and then briefly canceled but soon reinstated roughly $2 billion more, issued through the agency.
The administration’s Great American Recovery Initiative, backed by health secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and Kathryn Burgum, the wife of Interior Secretary Doug Burgum, has yet to produce significant funding or policy recommendations.
“ASAM appreciates the National Drug Control Strategy’s laudable goal of increasing access to evidence-based treatment for people with substance use disorders,” Stephen Taylor, the president of the American Society of Addiction Medicine, said in a statement after participating in a rollout event for the strategy on Wednesday. “The strategy rightly reinforces addiction as a chronic disease for which evidence-based treatments exist, including medication and psychosocial treatments that save lives and support recovery.”
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