On a cold, muggy morning in early September, a couple of dozen supporters from the Washington, D.C., opioid crisis group Americans for Safe Access huddled on a stone floor at the National Press Club.
The group, which is spearheading an alliance between the national organization Americans for Fair Drug Prices and the Drug Policy Alliance, had been meeting on a regular basis for the past year to push for a nationwide plan to control opioid use.
Now, the group had assembled a new strategy to combat the crisis, and it was one that had some unexpected political allies.
The group had been working on a strategy that would target opioid painkiller abuse at the state and local level, which they believed could help to slow the epidemic.
“We have a very strong and strong group of people who have been advocating on behalf of that in Washington, and they had a strong impact on the opioid bill,” said Andrew Kolodny, the director of the Drug and Alcohol Policy Program at The Heritage Foundation.
The opioid crisis, which has killed more than 16,000 people since the opioid epidemic was declared a national emergency in February, has been an ongoing battle since the Obama administration started to act on opioids more than two decades ago. “
The question was, do we want to have a robust national response, or do we need a very robust local response?”
The opioid crisis, which has killed more than 16,000 people since the opioid epidemic was declared a national emergency in February, has been an ongoing battle since the Obama administration started to act on opioids more than two decades ago.
President Donald Trump and lawmakers in Congress have repeatedly attempted to repeal the Affordable Care Act (ACA) and cut off federal funding for Medicaid and other health programs to help the nation deal with the crisis.
But the opioid-addiction crisis has not gone away.
A majority of Americans, according to a recent Pew Research Center survey, still think opioids are a major health problem, even as fewer say they will take any action to help.
The epidemic has also fueled anger and distrust toward the federal bureaucracy and government officials.
And Trump has refused to release any data to back up his claims that the opioid drug epidemic is on the decline.
The opioid crisis has also created a new, national political issue.
In recent weeks, some lawmakers have tried to introduce bills to combat opioid abuse in the U.S. While the proposals have met with resistance from the White House, many in Congress believe they are an important way to get the public on board with the president’s goal of addressing the opioid problem.
“It’s the first time that a bill has come to the floor that actually gets a majority of the people that are in the room to vote on it,” said Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.), who is the chairman of the Senate Committee on Health, Education, Labor and Pensions.
“So I think that it’s important to show some real, tangible results to the American people, and if we can’t, it’s time to do something else.”
The opioid epidemic has been a national issue since Trump took office.
During the 2016 presidential election, Trump repeatedly claimed that the drug problem was at a “tipping point” that would lead to a dramatic increase in deaths and overdose rates.
“When you talk about the opioid addiction epidemic, you really don’t talk about guns and you don’t say we have to have guns, you say, let’s deal with it,” Trump said at a rally in October.
“Instead, we have drugs, and that’s the problem.”
Since taking office, Trump has taken several steps to address the crisis and has said that the United States needs to focus on “a massive expansion” of federal programs aimed at helping people who use opioids.
While some of those measures have been successful, others have proven more controversial, such as the opioid painkillers OxyContin and Vicodin.
In December, Trump signed a bill that would require the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services to conduct studies on whether opioid pain relief programs should be considered Medicare or Medicaid programs.
The bill also would bar states from imposing restrictions on opioid pain treatment programs.
Since taking office in January, Trump’s administration has been aggressively targeting the opioid trade in hopes of pressuring Congress to pass new laws to address opioid abuse.
But some members of Congress have been wary of such moves and have been pushing back against the Trump administration’s efforts to make changes to the federal opioid plan.
In early February, Sens.
Tom Cotton (R.-Ark.) and Chris Murphy (D.-Conn.) introduced a bill to prohibit the opioid health care and insurance marketplaces from providing any new drugs for people to use.
The senators wrote that the new legislation would stop states from passing new drug pricing laws or establishing other regulations on the markets, as they have done in previous years.
The legislation has already failed to gain traction in the Senate, but Murphy said he expects it to be reintroduced this month.
“What we’ve done in the last several weeks is to demonstrate the leadership that we can do,” Murphy said.