Fighting the opioid epidemic will be the top priority for the House Energy and Commerce Committee over the next few months as Congress tries to put some substantive muscle behind President Trump’s declaration of emergency on prescription painkiller and heroin abuse.
Hoping to pass legislation through the House by Memorial Day, the committee will take the first steps next week with a bill to allow the Drug Enforcement Administration to classify more than a dozen forms of deadly fentanyl, which is driving opioid-related deaths but can be chemically manipulated to skirt legal restrictions.
The panel will also take up legislation giving hospice-care workers legal authority to dispose of opioid medications after a patient dies, so the pills don’t end up in the wrong hands.
By mid-March, the committee plans to explore ways to accelerate the development of non-addictive pain relievers and allow the National Institutes of Health to shift existing pots of money toward the fight.
“Combating the opioid crisis is Chairman [Greg] Walden’s top priority,” committee spokeswoman Jennifer Sherman said on behalf of the Oregon Republican. “Energy and Commerce has been working for years to deliver resources and fight this deadly epidemic, and this next step will be a bipartisan, collaborative effort to deliver relief to those who desperately need it.”
Opioid-related overdoses killed 42,000 people in the U.S. in 2016, and estimates suggest the problem worsened last year, due to the flood of synthetic fentanyl into the heroin supply.
Congress passed a pair of bills during President Obama’s final year in office to get a handle on the problem, directing $1 billion in grants to the states to expand treatment options and the use of overdose-reversing drugs.
Now, lawmakers are hoping to make a dent in the crisis through a second wave of action. The push also offers a rare chance for bipartisan cooperation.
Mr. Trump declared the opioids crisis a public health emergency in October and is asking for a sizable budget. Congress has agreed to dedicate $6 billion split between 2018 and 2019, while Mr. Trump in his budget blueprint last week suggested $3 billion this year and $10 billion next year.
Congressional leaders say they’ll end up throwing a record level of resources at the issue and will make sure insurance programs like Medicaid and Medicare cover medication-assisted treatments that effectively wean people off opioids.
Another proposal would expand the use of telemedicine, which allows doctors to diagnose and treat patients remotely, for people who live in rural areas and cannot access in-person specialists, hospitals or state-licensed clinics.
A bill by Rep. Brad Schneider, Illinois Democrat, would require 12 hours of continuing medical education, every three years, on pain-management guidelines, early detection of opioid addiction and treatment of opioid-dependent persons.
Reps. Mark DeSaulnier, California Democrat, and Buddy Carter, Georgia Republican, are proposing legislation to help pharmacists detect fraudulent prescriptions and, when necessary, decline them so pills aren’t abused or diverted to the black market.
The House committee also plans to investigate why millions of opioids pill flooded small towns in West Virginia, which has the highest overdose death rate in the country, and probe whether Congress should repeal or tweak a 2016 law that made it harder for the DEA to immediately suspend suspicious shipments of narcotics.
The Senate Health Committee held its own hearings on the epidemic in recent weeks and will explore the role of technology and data in the fight on Tuesday.
States’ prescription-drug monitoring systems, for instance, show “great promise in helping fight this heartbreaking crisis,” Chairman Lamar Alexander, Tennessee Republican, said.
Outside of Congress, the Food and Drug Administration in recent weeks has been cracking down on opioid-related products that can be dangerous, especially if consumed in large amounts.
It redrafted guidance and warnings for certain cough medicines, urged the makers of an anti-diarrhea medicine that contains opioids to repackage its product — so people aren’t tempted to take too many doses — and it got a Missouri company to stop sell products containing kratom, a plant from Southeast Asia that contains opioid compounds.
• Tom Howell Jr. can be reached at thowell@washingtontimes.com.
Please read our comment policy before commenting.