"Imagine what the 2024 presidential campaign would look like if nearly 300 Americans were killed every day in terrorist attacks. That’s how many people die in a typical day from drug overdoses. Unfortunately, if it does become a campaign issue, it will
only be in the most demagogic and inane way possible.

Here’s the irony: Though you wouldn’t know it from GOP proposals to invade Mexico as the solution to the problem, most Democrats and Republicans don’t differ much on how to address the addiction crisis. That’s because by now, most people
understand that addiction is a disease and not a failure of character. But getting lawmakers to act on that hard-earned wisdom is another story.

More than 100,000 Americans are now dying from overdoses each year, even though the catalyst for this crisis — drug companies pouring vast quantities of addictive painkillers such as OxyContin into vulnerable communities — is largely in the past.
Once the pill mills closed, people with substance use disorder had to look elsewhere to feed their addictions, which they did — with other prescription drugs, heroin and then fentanyl.

Republican candidates seem to start and end every discussion about overdoses by blaming President Biden’s border policies, but that’s simply absurd. First, the largest increase in fatal overdoses happened in 2020, when Donald Trump was president.
That year saw a 30 percent spike from the year before.
...
“There isn’t one big policy lever you can pull at the congressional level” to solve the crisis, Izquierdo told me. Instead, there are dozens of different factors that have to be addressed, from simply keeping people alive to distributing overdose-
reversing naloxone to providing the child care, job assistance and health coverage that allows people to stay clean. And that’s just a start.

But you won’t find much nuanced discussion about it in the presidential campaign. That will be especially true if Donald Trump is the Republican nominee. When he talks about overdoses, he offers a torrent of lies and made-up statistics, pretending that
ideas such as instituting the death penalty for drug dealers will solve everything.
...
With the death rate as high as it is, the problem will be with us not just through the next election, but for decades. “We need a 20-year plan. We need a 50-year plan,” says Shelly Weizman of Georgetown University’s Addiction and Public Policy
Initiative. “Where do we want to be in 20 years after all this money is spent? What do we want it to look like? Is it just less death, or do we want to really help people live?”

Thinking in those terms isn’t as dramatic as pretending that the addiction crisis can be solved by SEAL Team 6, but it is what we actually need. Perhaps it would be better if presidential candidates didn’t talk about it all."

https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2023/09/25/overdoses-opioids-addiction-epidemic-republicans/

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