WASHINGTON — A new White House initiative to combat the use and trafficking of heroin, particularly along the East Coast, marks a shift in tactics used to fight the drug.
The $5 million program would prioritize treatment for drug users over punishments. The aim is to make law enforcement more nimble by hiring 15 drug intelligence officers and 15 health policy analysts to collect overdose data and transfer what they find out to police officers on the street, according to The Washington Post, which reported on the initiative Sunday, ahead of Monday’s official announcement.
The program will span 15 states and will be funded for one year, The Post reports.
“The theory is that if they bring health officials together with law enforcement, they can track where this is happening, where the drug is coming from, and get people working together across state lines in a way that’s been very difficult to do up until now,” Marc Fisher, a senior editor at The Washington Post, tells WTOP.
The announcement of the pilot program arrives amid a spike in usage and deaths tied to heroin.
According to the Centers of Disease Control and Prevention, the number of heroin users rose by nearly 300,000 over the course of a decade. Fisher, citing figures from the CDC, said the number of heroin overdoses leading to death has quadrupled in past decade.
“It’s happening in so many states that there’s considerable political pressure now on the administration to change the tactics being used against heroin,” Fisher tells WTOP. “And emerging political consensus among Democrats and Republicans is that the war on drugs needs to be shifted into more of a public health emphasis, [rather] than just putting people behind bars.”
In Virginia, the number of heroin deaths in Fairfax County doubled between 2013 and 2014. Overdoses in Loudoun County increased 400 percent since 2012, WTOP has reported. Maryland Gov. Larry Hogan and officials in Anne Arundel County have declared it a “public health emergency.”
But will federal program be enough to stem the epidemic?
Fisher says, “No.”
“This is a drop in the bucket. It’s an experiment,” he tells WTOP.
“Obviously, they’ll try to expand, it if it does well, across the country. But this is a very small piece of a larger effort. About 100 billion dollars were put in to play earlier this year to increase treatment options. But the really desperate need is for more treatment facilities across the country, more treatment beds. That is something that funding has not been found for as of yet.”
