Unlike in other recent presidential elections, addiction has taken center stage on the campaign trail with candidates revealing personal stories and signaling a national shift in perspective on how to address the issue from criminalization to treatment.
Over the past few months, with the help of New Hampshire residents, who ranked drug abuse as the most important problem facing the state over jobs and the economy, the heroin crisis in particular has been pushed into the national spotlight, prompting the presidential contenders to talk about addiction at forums, debates and town hall meetings leading up to the first primary election, set for Feb. 9 in that East Coast state.
Local treatment providers and addiction experts hope the discussion will lead to real solutions; the Chicago area ranked first in the U.S. for heroin-related emergency room visits in a report released last summer.
“This is the first time, I would say, the way it’s been conceptualized [is] instead of a war on drugs, it’s a public health approach to the opioid overdose epidemic,” said Kathleen Kane-Willis, director of the Illinois Consortium on Drug Policy at Roosevelt University.
Democratic presidential hopeful Bernie Sanders scored points for calling addiction a “disease, not a criminal activity” during a December debate. Meanwhile, GOP hopeful Chris Christie shared in a video that has gone viral how his mother struggled with her smoking addiction and how a law school buddy got addicted to painkillers and died of an overdose. Carly Fiorina, who’s also vying for the GOP nod, wrote in a Time piece about how she lost her stepdaughter to the “demons of addiction.”
The personal stories can be a way to help voters pick a candidate in a crowded field, said Zachary Cook, political science professor at DePaul University. The nature of the primary process has put special emphasis on drug addiction, an issue that rose up from voters and that candidates are responding to, he said.
“First off, we are seeing a really distressing increase in the number of deaths from heroin and from other drug overdoses, and secondly we are seeing it especially in the state of New Hampshire, which is ground zero right now for both political parties,” Cook said.
The national statistics are staggering. Heroin-related deaths nearly quadrupled between 2002 and 2013, with more than 8,200 deaths in 2013 alone, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
But the public conversation needs to go a step further, said Ramsen Kasha, executive director of the Hazelden Betty Ford Foundation in Chicago.
“We have to not just hear the disease affects everybody,” Kasha said. “It’s just as important to hear recovery is possible and having a healthy lifestyle in recovery is possible and it does happen with regularity.”
Hearing that can motivate and encourage others to seek treatment, he said.
As heroin use has climbed, state funding for treatment in Illinois has been slashed. The report authored by Kane-Willis found that Illinois was among the worst in the country in providing publicly funded treatment for addiction.
“I’m really heartened by the conversation at the national level. But I still think we have so much work to do,” Kane-Willis said. “We don’t have the capacity nationally and in Illinois to treat the opioid disorder, opioid addiction.”
She has advocated for more treatment, including medication-assisted treatment like methadone and buprenorphine and greater access to naloxone, which reverses heroin overdoses. Federal grants could help states assess their immediate and future needs for treatment and fill the gap between need and availability of treatment, she said.
While reforms focused on sentencing, treatment policies and health care typically are state-level matters, the president can use the office as a bully pulpit to set priorities and articulate what issues he or she feels the states and local governments should be working on, Cook said.
All the talk by candidates about the substance abuse problem leaves some wanting to see details on how exactly they plan to address it and how much money will be allocated.
“It’d be great to hear a more thorough plan,” Kasha said. “It’s great you think this is an issue but now what do we do about it, how do we treat it?”
In an op-ed, Democratic candidate Hillary Clinton outlined her $10 billion plan to fight drug and alcohol addiction with five major points: prevention; treatment and recovery; first responders having access to naloxone; prescribers being required to consult a drug monitoring program before writing prescriptions for controlled substances; and criminal justice reform to prioritize treatment over incarceration.
GOP hopeful Jeb Bush told voters in an ad called “Recovery” posted to YouTube last month about his daughter who struggled with drug addiction and went through a drug court program. His strategy includes broadening access to drug courts, enacting stiffer sentences for drug cartels and violent traffickers and improving border security to stop drugs from entering the country.
GOP candidate Donald Trump has said he wants to battle the heroin problem on two fronts: local treatment clinics and a wall he wants to build at the border to stop the source of the drug flow.
Candidates often make campaign promises, but it’s up to the voters to hold them accountable.
“It’s on us as voters to remind them through our votes that this is something that’s very important to our country and quite easily one of the biggest issues this country is facing,” Kasha said.
@lvivanco | lvivanco@redeyechicago.com
You can find our coverage of addiction online and in print the first Wednesday of each month this year. As ever, we’d like to hear your feedback. If you want us to consider sharing your stories related to addiction in our publication, please send them to redeye@redeyechicago.com with “Addiction” in the subject line.
