ATLANTA — President Trump promised the full force of the federal government “to liberate Americans from the grip of addiction and to end the opioid crisis once and for all,” while also pledging strong support for faith-based initiatives in the effort to push back the opioid epidemic.
As keynote speaker at the RX Drug & Heroin Summit Wednesday, he ticked off a list of steps taken and money spent by the federal government in support of the work participants at the summit, the largest of its kind, do every day all over the country.
The four-day event draws 3,000 to 4,000 people from a wide range of professions involved in opioid response efforts, including clinicians, physicians and behavioral health and addiction specialists, law enforcement, probation, corrections officers, public health, prevention and harm reduction specialists and people from all levels of government from local to the federal Centers for Disease Control and National Institutes of Health. The conference also draws people in recovery and their families.
“My administration is deploying every resource at our disposal to empower you, to support you, to fight right by your side,” he said. “We will not stop until this job is done. We will succeed. We have results that are unbelievable. We’re making tremendous progress.”
Last year the federal government provided $90 million in support of efforts to prevent substance use among youth, he noted.
“My surgeon general,” he said, is working tirelessly to expand access to treatment resources and other services.
Trump also claimed credit for securing $6 billion in new funding to combat the opioid crisis. He said he has allocated $2 billion in opioid response grants to states, and “we’re going for even more.”
“No other president did that — no other president,” he said, one of a head-spinning array of superlatives lacing his 40-minute talk, as is his custom.
His speech drew about 2,500 people from the conference who waited in line for hours to pass through security and get into the ballroom where he appeared, alongside his wife, Melania Trump, and senior adviser Kellyanne Conway.
After being admitted to the ballroom, the crowd waited another two hours with speakers blasting music, including Elton John’s “Candle in the Wind” and Tina Turner’s “Simply the Best,” which played more than once.
He stopped several times during his remarks to invite people to the podium to offer remarks, including two people in recovery and a man whose son died of an opioid overdose in 2017.
In the audience was a contingent of people from Hampshire County, including several Northampton and Hadley police officers who are members of their towns’ Drug Addiction Response Teams, known as DART. Also present were J. Cherry Sullivan and Michele Farry, coordinator and assistant program coordinator for the Hampshire HOPE opioid prevention coalition run out of the city of Northampton.
Sullivan noted that many of the accomplishments Trump cited are foundations for all public health efforts.
“A lot of what he shared is public health prevention work, which takes time to see results, and while he cited improved numbers during his administration, we know the work started years ago, because prevention takes time,” Sullivan said.
Other steps the president touted were the distribution of 1 million units of naloxone, increasing the number of residential facilities, increasing by 62 percent the number of clinics offering medication assisted treatment (MAT), increased access to MAT in jail and a program called Veterans Choice, which allows veterans to see private doctors rather than wait for months to see a doctor in the VA system.
“It’s new and it’s incredible the difference it’s made,” he said.
And when people are released from jails and prisons, they can find jobs “because our economy is doing so well, the best it’s ever done in our history,” he said. “The best of everything.”
In addition to the resources devoted to helping people battling addiction and their families, President Trump described his administration’s “unprecedented effort” to stop the flow of drugs across the border, along with the people who bring them.
“Some of those people are people we don’t want in our country,” he said.
He also talked about the wall. The media, he said, doesn’t like it, but “We’re going to have a wall, a big, powerful wall.”
The building of the 400-mile wall, he said, is ahead of schedule.
“We’ve secured historic funding to strengthen border security, including equipment, including the wall and some things you don’t even want to know about,” he said. “Beautiful, great, strong, powerful equipment.”
Dogs are also used at the border, and Trump said sometimes they work even better than all the equipment.
“We also have a lot of dogs and they’re great dogs and we cherish them,” he said.
He railed at drug companies that inflate prices in the United States and sell at lower cost in European countries, creating a rigged system that hurts “our great seniors.”
And here, he took a detour. “I know all about the rigging of the system because I had the system rigged on me, and you know what I mean,” he said. “And that’s going to be the sound bite tomorrow.”
Laurie Loisel, director of outreach and education at the office of Northwestern District Attorney David E. Sullivan, is accompanying the Hampshire HOPE delegation at the RX Drug & Heroin Summit as a guest of Hampshire HOPE specifically to file news reports out of the conference.