President Trump has long criticized drug traffickers. He has said they should receive the death penalty “for their atrocious acts.” The first day of his second term, he signed an executive order that lists posters as “terrorist organizations.”
But many public health and addiction experts fear that budget proposals and other actions punish people who use drugs and fight addiction.
The Trump administration has promised to reduce overdose deaths, one of the most mortal public health crises in the country, emphasizing the application of the law, border patrols and tariffs against China and Mexico to avoid fentanyl and other dangerous drugs. But it is also looking for huge cuts to programs that reduce drug demand.
The budget presented to Congress this month to eliminate more than one billion dollars for national and regional treatment and prevention services. The main federal agency that addresses the use of drugs, the administration of substance and mental health services, has so far lost half of its workers’ workers under the Trump administration and is scheduled to collapse in the new administration for a healthy America and whose United States and America Whousy, use.
And if Medicaid reductions are arguing for Republicans in Congress, millions of Americans will not be able to continue, much less start treatment.
The White House did not respond to comments requests. The budget itself says that the end of drug trafficking “begins with safe borders and a commitment to law and order” and that is reducing addiction services that are considered duplication or “too small to have a national impact.”
These cuts are agonizing, they say public health experts, because they come when the country is making sustained progress to reduce the number of deaths from fentanyl. Many interventions may be contributing to that progress, including greater availability of overdose reversal naloxone; More treatment beds, sober housing and peer advice; And the strength and amount of the illicit drug supply decreases, they say. But the studies have so far not demonstrated convincingly which of the factors deserve a greater approach and investment.
“It would be a tragedy if we worn these programs in full time, overcoming what works and then the excess rate began to rise again,” said Dr. Ir. Matthew Christiansen, Medicine of Medicine of Addiction in Huntington, W.VA., a city that once tagged the zero zone for the opioid crisis.
A letter signed by more than 320 academic experts of behavioral medicine, sent on Monday to the leaders of the Congress, denounced the cuts, including those of “community -based naloxone distribution, pairs dissemination programs, progress related to drug use”. “
The president’s budget requires final subsidies for “damage reduction”, a strategy to prevent disease transmission and keep drug users alive that have greatly accepted by the main addiction suppliers.
The budget is carried out federal support for “dangerous activities announced as” damage reduction “, included” kits and smoking safe “and” syringes “for drug users.”
That language is a call to false reports in 2022 that a federal damage reduction of $ 30 million could be used to buy pipes for smoking crack and methamphetamine. In fact, a small portion of that subsidy, designated for “safer smoking kits”, was for supplies such as alcohol and lip balloss. The subsidy also supported programs in states that allow exchanges of sterile syringes, effective in reducing infection rates by hepatitis C and HIV.
“You can’t simply tell people to stop using drugs with a snapshot of the fingers,” said Dr. Christiansen, former director of West Virginia’s drug control policy. “These are tools to reduce damage or opioids, while helping them to succeed in the long term.”
According to the annual substance use survey of the Federal Agency, in 2023, 27.2 million Americans of 12 years or more had a drug use disorder, 28.9 million had an alcohol consumption disorder and 7.5 million had both.
The budget leaves intact block subsidies for states to fight addiction and mental illness. But without the additional subsidies, the training and practical monitoring of the agency, in addition to the possible reductions of Medicaid, the states cannot pay the many medical and social services necessary to prevent and treat addiction, said Dr. Christiansen.
David Herzberg, a professor of policy and drug history at the University of Buffalo, said that the almost determined linkage of Mr. Trump of the nation’s drug problems with border problems dates back to America in the late nineteenth century, when the Government associated opium dense with Chinese immigrants. Fearing the foray of Chinese workers and inflamed by the press reports of Chinese men who use opium to attract young White to prostitution, Congress severely restricted Chinese immigration.
Then, as now, said Mr. Herzberg, political conservatives discovered that addressing foreign drug suppliers was a muscular meaning of moving forward in broader agendas.
In contrast to highly publicized drug seizures, people who use chronic drugs have become after the time, always visible only as street irritants, their addiction is the result of their own choices, Hey said. Chosen leaders who advocate their risk of well -being that are torridos as soft with crime.
“If politicians are going to hit their neck, I would be surprised,” said Herzberg.
