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Trump to Declare Opioid Crisis a 'National Emergency' Associated Press by Jill Covin and Jonathan Lemire — President Donald Trump said Thursday that he will officially declare the opioid crisis a “national emergency” and pledged to ramp up government efforts to combat the epidemic. “The opioid crisis is an emergency. And I am saying officially right now: It is an emergency, it’s a national emergency. We’re going to spend a lot of time, a lot of effort and a lot of money on the opioid crisis,” Trump told reporters during a brief question-and-answer session ahead of a security briefing Thursday at his golf course in Bedminster, New Jersey.
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Deaths from Drug Overdoses Soared in the First Nine Months of 2016 Washington Post by Lenny Bernstein — Deaths from drug overdoses rose sharply in the first nine months of 2016, the government reported Tuesday, releasing data that confirm the widely held belief that the opioid epidemic worsened last year despite stepped-up efforts by public health authorities. The National Center for Health Statistics reported that overdose deaths reached a record 19.9 per 100,000 population in the third quarter, a big increase over the 16.7 recorded for the same three months in 2015. Similarly, the first two quarters of last year showed death rates of 18.9 and 19.3, far greater than the corresponding periods for 2015. Data for the fourth quarter of 2016 are not yet available.
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One in 12 Doctors Receive Payments from Opioid Makers Modern Healthcare by Steven Ross Johnson — One in 12 U.S. doctors accepted payments from opioid manufacturers from 2013 to 2015, raising questions over how drug companies may influence prescribing practices. All in all, more than 68,000 physicians received more than $46 million between 2013 and 2015 in non-research payments from drugmakers that create pain-killing opioids or medication-assisted opioid treatments like buprenorphine, according to a study published in the American Journal of Public Health on Wednesday. Although researchers found the doctors received an average payment of $15, the top 1 percent of physicians received 82 percent of all opioid drugmaker payments, or $38 million at an average of $2,600 per top physician.