Opioid Bill Is First Step in a Long Journey
Every 12.4 minutes in America, opioids kill someone. This crisis is fracturing families and communities across our country. Our opioid plight didn’t appear overnight, and it’s not going away any faster. Still, we’re moving in the right direction, as illustrated by President Trump signing the SUPPORT for Patients and Communities Act, sweeping bipartisan legislation to fight opioid misuse and abuse.
I’ve been tracking this legislation from the beginning because for me, it’s personal.
I work at University Hospitals in Cleveland, Ohio, where I am dedicated to ensuring the medical community is safely and responsibly prescribing opioids.
Ohio has been described as “ground zero” for the opioid epidemic — and rightly so. In fact, according to the Ohio Department of Health, drug-related deaths eclipsed auto accidents as the state’s top cause of injury deaths in 2007 — a trend that has continued ever since.
While reality is stark for our state, it has also helped us take the lead in the battle against opioid dependence.
As physician chair of the Northeast Ohio Hospital Opioid Consortium (NEO), I head a group representing five competing hospital systems. We have all come together to fight prescription opioid abuse and misuse through communication, education, patient management, harm reduction, treatment, prevention, data analysis, and public policy reform.
Together, we have learned a lot. We better understand some of the causes of the epidemic and how we can deal with them. We’ve seen what is working and what isn’t. And we’ve learned that the ripple effects go far beyond those struggling with addiction.
These lessons and insights are how I know that the SUPPORT for Patients and Communities Act will help programs like ours continue to fight this crisis. There is no silver bullet, but the SUPPORT Act contains several useful tools.
First, it closes loopholes that allow people to send fentanyl — a synthetic drug 50 times more potent than heroin — into our country through the mail. Today, the U.S. Postal Service doesn’t know what’s in packages that come from abroad. This new law requires that foreign packages reveal their contents, the sender’s identity, and where they're coming from.
This legislation also supports treatment and recovery. For starters, it creates a grant program through the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration to allow organizations to develop opioid recovery centers. It also requires the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) to determine best practices and create a grant program implementing policies or procedures, such as the use of recovery coaches. It authorizes HHS to develop grants to help recovering addicts transition to independent living and jobs, as well as a pilot program to provide temporary housing for those recovering from substance abuse.
Finally, it recognizes the importance of medication-assisted treatments (MAT). Specifically, it increases the cap, from 100 to 275, on the number of patients a qualified doctor can prescribe drugs designed to relieve opioid withdrawal symptoms and psychological cravings. It also expands a grant program allowing first responders to administer medication-assisted treatments.
The signing of this bill is a positive step, but the opioid crisis cannot be solved by a single piece of legislation. What this bill does do is create an environment so that everyone — doctors, nurses, families, governors, judges, counselors, law enforcement and others — can succeed in fighting this epidemic.
Rest assured, in Ohio and across the country, we will continue working and fighting for every person whose life is touched by this crisis.
Dr. Randy Jernejcic is the vice president of clinical integration for University Hospitals in Cleveland, Ohio, and the physician chair of the Northeast Ohio Hospital Opioid Consortium.
