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- By Elyse Wild
President Donald Trump issued an executive order on Thursday launching an initiative aimed at filling in the gaps of access to addiction treatment and mitigating the fallout of the ongoing overdose crisis. The order comes after the administration announced last month the gutting of nearly $2 billion in programs providing addiction and mental health services across the nation, only to rescind the cuts 24 hours later.
Dubbed “The Great American Recovery,” a press release from the White House claims the project aims to prioritize addiction as any other chronic disease — “utilizing evidence-based care, scientific advancement, continuous support, and community connection.”
This latest initiative will be led by a commission co-chaired by the Secretary of Health and Human Services, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., and the Senior Advisor for Addiction Recovery. The commission will include officials from more than a dozen federal agencies, including the Secretary of the Interior and the Director of National Drug Control Policy. The commission will consult with states, tribal nations, local jurisdictions, and NGOs to determine the best way to deliver addiction care.
The program includes a $100M investment in public health and safety around homelessness and opioid addiction.
Called The Safety Through Recovery, Engagement, and Evidence-based Treatment and Supports — or STREETS — the investment will fund targeted outreach, psychiatric care, medical stabilization, and crisis intervention, while connecting individuals suffering from addiction and homelessness to treatment and stable housing, according to the announcement.
As well, under the executive order, HHS approved three medications used to treat opioid use disorder for federal funding in family welfare cases in which children are at-risk for entering the foster care system but are otherwise able to remain in the home if parents or guardians have access to the medications.
States and tribes can now receive a 50% federal match to provide buprenorphine, methadone, and naltrexone to parents and guardians in such cases.
A Crisis
According to experts, the overdose crisis is currently in its fourth wave, beginning with prescription opioids in the late 1990s, a resurgence of heroin around 2010, and, in the last 10 years, heroin being mixed with fentanyl, a highly lethal synthetic opioid that is as much as 50 times as strong as heroin. Fentanyl is now increasingly found in non-opioid drugs such as cocaine and methamphetamine, which is driving up overdoses among users of those drugs.
While every community across the United States has been touched by the crisis that has claimed more than 800,000 lives, Native American communities have been the most affected, with the highest overdose rates.
The wounds inflicted by colonialism, the violent removal of tribes from their ancestral lands, generations of forced assimilation via federal Indian Boarding Schools, and broken treaty promises have left Indian Country with disproportionately high rates of depression, anxiety, and suicidal ideation — and especially vulnerableto the effects of the opioid crisis.
The death rate for opioid overdoses dropped by26% from 2023 to 2024, the steepest decline in 25 years. Amid the decline, overdose rates among Native Americans fell by 22%, but remain the highest among any demographic.
Some researchers credit the drop to a supply shortage of illicit fentanyl, while others attribute it to increased access to overdose reversal drug naloxone and younger generations abstaining from using drugs.
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