As Overdoses Surge, Biden Blocks Hasty Effort to Expand Addiction Treatment
Susan Stevens shows off a prescription for Suboxone at her home in Lewisville, North Carolina, on March 11, 2019.
Eamon Queeney / For The Washington Post via Getty Images
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On the campaign trail, President Joe Biden pledged to tackle the opioid crisis and remove federal restrictions on buprenorphine, a lifesaving treatment for opioid addiction. So far, the Biden administration has surprised doctors and addiction experts by moving in the opposite direction.
The Biden administration recently blocked an effort to expand access to buprenorphine, a drug the Biden campaign correctly called a “gold standard” for treating opioid addiction. Major medicalassociations and public health advocates who had applauded the effort, which came in the final days of the Trump administration, were left disappointed by Biden. On Wednesday, the White House said lifting restrictions on addiction medications remains a prio
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Some 81,000 people died of a drug overdose between May 2019 and May 2020. It’s the highest number of overdose deaths ever recorded in a 12-month period and the main culprit was synthetic opioids.
But the Biden administration’s plan to combat the opioid crisis remains unclear. The president has delayed former President Donald Trump’s plan to make it easier for physicians to prescribe opioid-treatment drugs. The move has been criticized by medical professionals who have said the plan would have helped their patients dealing with prescription drug addictions.
Some opioid crisis stakeholders are especially frustrated given that President Biden has lagged on nominating heads for federal agencies that would combat the crisis, including the Food and Drug Administration, the White House Office of National Drug Control Policy and the Drug Enforcement Administration.
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Watchdog groups and Democratic lawmakers have raised concerns about Trump officials’ records management.
The National Archives and Records Administration is still completing the transfer of records from the Trump White House amid concerns that officials did not adequately preserve them.
The agency said it received approximately 4,700 cubic feet of textual records (roughly 11.8 million pages) and expects to take in up to 500 terabytes of electronic records for documents that fall under the Presidential Records Act. For comparison, the George W. Bush White House had about 29,000 cubic feet of textual records and about 80 terabytes of electronic records and Obama had about 15,000 cubic feet of textual records and about 250 terabytes of electronic ones. Documents can start to be made public five years after a president leaves office and will eventually be housed in a presidential library.
Around the nation: How a snowy traffic jam became an impromptu Covid-19 vaccination site
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Health care workers in Cave Junction, Oregon, were returning from a Covid-19 vaccination site when they got stuck on a shut-down highway in the snow and because their extra vaccine doses were in danger of expiring, they walked from car to car, offering vaccines to other people stuck in traffic, in today s bite-sized hospital and health industry news from the District of Columbia, Indiana, and Oregon.
District of Columbia: The Biden administration on Wednesday said it was calling off a plan announced by former President Donald Trump s administration that would make it easier for more physicians to prescribe buprenorphine, a medication-assisted treatment for opioid use disorders. The Trump administration had directed federal agencies update guidelines to exempt physicians with a
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