“I have had the opportunity to hear from many on the front lines of the opioid epidemic, and I'm confident that by working with our healthcare and law enforcement experts we will fight this deadly epidemic and the United States will win,” Mr Trump said alongside administration officials at his golf club in Bedminster, New Jersey.
“We're also very, very tough on the southern border where much of this comes in, and we're talking to China, where certain forms of man-made drug comes in and it is bad.”
Earlier this year, Mr Trump told Mexican President Enrique Peña Nieto that he won the state of New Hampshire during the presidential election because it is “a drug-infested den”.
“And we have the drug lords in Mexico that are knocking the hell out of our country,” Mr Trump said, according to a transcript of the conversation obtained by the Washington Post. “They are sending drugs to Chicago, Los Angeles, and to New York.”
The Trump administration has so far not announced any new policies to confront the opioid crisis.
After meeting with the President about the issue, Health and Human Services Secretary Tom Price told reporters at a press conference that Mr Trump “is fully engaged.”
Other meeting attendees included First Lady Melania Trump and top White House adviser and Mr Trump’s son-in-law, Jared Kushner.
Mr Price was repeatedly asked why the President is not declaring a national emergency, as his opioid commission recommended last week.
“The president certainly believes that it is, that we will treat it as an emergency – and it is an emergency,” Mr Price said. “When you have the capacity of Yankee stadium or Dodger stadium dying every single year in this nation, that’s a crisis that has to be given incredible attention and the president is giving it that attention.”
Since 1999, the number of overdose deaths involving opioids – including prescription opioids and heroin – quadrupled, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. The agency reported that the number of prescription opioids sold in the US has also nearly quadrupled since 1999, but that there has not been an overall change in the amount of pain Americans report.
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