Global Courant
President Joe Biden’s administration on Tuesday pledged an enhanced effort to combat drug overdoses that claimed the lives of about 100,000 Americans last year, using a White House summit to tout a multifaceted approach to addressing synthetic and illicit drugs. such as the powerful opioid fentanyl.
“Today’s summit is necessary because the global and regional drug environment has changed dramatically from even a few years ago,” Rahul Gupta, director of the White House Office of National Drug Control Policy, told the summit, which, along with public health officials. from Mexico and Canada.
Gupta added that “synthetic drugs have truly become a global threat.”
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Biden administration officials said they would use tools such as drugs to reverse opioid overdoses and use data collection to guide their efforts.
“Today we are here to … see how our collective response can be improved and what role data collection plays in saving lives,” Gupta said.
According to data shared at the summit, more than 109,000 Americans died of drug overdoses last year, about two-thirds of them from synthetic drugs like fentanyl.
Plastic bags of fentanyl are displayed on a table in a US Customs and Border Protection area in Chicago, Illinois, on Nov. 29, 2017. REUTERS/Joshua Lott (REUTERS/Joshua Lott)
An unprecedented number of people die each year from overdoses and poisonings in the United States, Mexico and Canada, Gupta said.
US Secretary of Health and Human Services Xavier Becerra said a regional approach is critical to addressing the overdose and addiction crisis.
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The Biden administration said last month it was seeking a meeting with the makers of the lifesaving drug naloxone, used to reverse opioid overdoses, in an effort to increase access and reduce costs.
Opioid abuse has plagued the United States for more than two decades and, according to federal data, has claimed the lives of more than half a million Americans, making the highly addictive painkillers a public health crisis.
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The White House said in April that the United States planned to expand efforts to disrupt illicit financial activities of drug traffickers involved in the fentanyl trade by stepping up the use of sanctions.
Some US lawmakers have called on the Biden administration to step up and step up pressure on Mexico to crack down on the fentanyl trade. A handful of Republican lawmakers have called on the US military to bomb Mexican cartels and their laboratories in Mexico — a proposal the Biden administration has failed to embrace.
