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1.
Drug Overdoses Dropped for the First Time in Thirty Years Under Trump
Nearly 64,000 Americans died from a drug overdose in 2016 alone. Opioid overdoses accounted for more than 42,000 of these deaths, more than any previous year on record. The number of overdose deaths increased for the next two years. Then, 2018 marked the end of a grim chapter in American history—or, pessimists say, perhaps a blip interrupting an otherwise irreversible trend. Either way, it was historic.
By mid-2019, the U.S. Centers for Disease Control (CDC) had preliminary data from 2018 showing that, for the first time since 1990, the number of drug overdose deaths in America dropped. In July 2019 the New York Times cited the CDC, reporting that 68,557 people died of drug overdoses in 2018, representing a 5 percent drop from 2017, which saw about 72,000 deaths. By January 2020, the CDC revealed that the final, verified number of overdose deaths in 2018 was even lower: 67,367, a 6.4 percent drop.
“The decline was due almost entirely to a dip in deaths from prescription opioid painkillers, the medicines that set off the epidemic of addiction that has lasted nearly two decades,” the New York Times noted in its July report. The final statistics said the same.
The dramatic change in overdose rates fueled a modest increase in overall American life expectancy, something that had failed to happen in 2015, at the height of the drug crisis.
Even the bad news from the CDC’s report was, for once, slightly less bad. While deaths due to heroin and prescription painkillers declined, the number of deaths attributable to fentanyl increased that year. But they increased at a slightly less dramatic rate than they had in the immediate past, suggesting a full reversal on the horizon. Fentanyl is an opioid painkiller up to 100 times more potent than morphine that, thanks largely to the Chinese government, has flooded the American drug market. Opioid addicts make up most of the fentanyl overdose deaths. Faced with stricter doctors who no longer refill prescriptions for painkillers, opioid addicts may seek an alternative on the street. Consuming fentanyl in amounts similar to less-concentrated opioids, like prescription painkillers, makes overdose incredibly likely. “Between 2013 and 2016, it [the fentanyl overdose rate] was doubling pretty much every year. If it’s less than doubling, I guess you can call that an improvement,” Dr. Holly Hedegaard, an injury epidemiologist at the CDC’s National Center for Health Statistics, told U.S. News & World Report in January 2020.
The CDC’s numbers still reflected a national tragedy but, for the first time since the opioid crisis gripped American communities, it felt like it might one day end. This positive shift followed the Trump White House’s concerted effort to change the medical culture around opioids, keep deadly drugs off the market, and provide victims of the crisis access to lifesaving treatments. In 2017, his first year in office, President Donald Trump declared the opioid crisis a national emergency and mobilized diverse sectors of his administration to combat the scourge in a holistic manner. Trump’s team reframed what had previously been considered almost exclusively a healthcare matter, recognizing it as a crisis that extended beyond public health into border control, illegal immigration, and foreign policy. Rather than concentrating only on access to drugs that prevent overdoses, the Trump administration targeted the sources of deadly, illegal forms of opioids to take them off the market, while also pressuring the pharmaceutical companies and doctors to stop overprescribing legal opioids. He and First Lady Melania Trump also gave the issue prominence in a way that not only conveyed the urgency of the problem, but also treated addicts with respect—considering them victims, not criminals.
Certainly, Trump can’t declare victory on this one quite yet, but to understand why is to know exactly how severely opioids had corrupted American medical culture. Trump couldn’t launch a Reagan-style “just say no” campaign against opioids because, unlike the cocaine and ketamine of the 1980s, opioids were being prescribed by doctors. Opioid crisis victims are not just lost souls seeking a physical escape from their dreary lives—they are, often, people dealing with illness whose only sin was to trust a doctor. They did everything right: They promptly visited a medical professional when they felt physically unwell, and they took the remedies the expert recommended. But they still wound up addicted to drugs. Those with chronic pain from injuries, arthritis, or other conditions also received opioid prescriptions liberally for much of the 2010s. Individuals undergoing nearly every possible type of surgery were also among those preyed on by doctors in that decade, according to a study by the Johns Hopkins School of Public Health and Kaiser Health News.
Doctors didn’t need more excuses to prescribe opioids, or more patients to corrupt, but the Affordable Care Act (ACA) helped with that anyway. Signed in 2010 but officially activated in 2014, the ACA’s Medicaid expansion, liberals will note, greatly expanded access to drugs like naloxone, used to save someone overdosing and reverse the effects of opioids. Unfortunately, it also greatly increased access to opioids. “For dangerous opioids such as oxycodone, Medicaid co-pays can run as low as $1 for as many as 240 pills—pills that can be sold for up to $4,000 on the street,” a 2018 report by the Senate’s Committee on Security and Governmental Affairs observed. This incentivized people with opioid prescriptions to sell at high prices, fueling addicts but also giving them reason to continue asking for refills, even if they had been prescribed far more opioids than necessary after surgery.
The Senate report found that the black market for opioids grew much more organized and lucrative as the ACA (also known as Obamacare) began to take form, creating rings of drug sales that targeted people in need:
In one Connecticut case, a ringleader recruited Medicaid beneficiaries to obtain nearly $200,000 of oxycodone from pharmacies through forged prescriptions. “He preyed on a lot of low-income people with Medicaid cards,” according to a police lieutenant who helped oversee the investigation. Pharmacists “were very trusting just because it was Medicaid,” said the lieutenant, who added: “Absolutely, Medicaid is what allowed him to make so much money.”
While financially beneficial to drug companies and doctors, Obamacare’s opioid near-giveaways did nothing to help insurance companies, which were stuck footing the bill for patients not on Medicare under the ACA’s protocol. Insurers ultimately began crafting coverage plans with limited aid for drugs like naloxone, or opioids themselves, in what RealClearHealth called a “race to the bottom.” Insurance companies’ aim was to shoo away patients whom, under Obamacare, they would have been forced to cover.
This started to happen just as the CDC had begun to implement new guidelines for prescribing opioids in an attempt to limit access to these dangerous drugs, which had previously been more widely available. Thus, an increase in heroin and fentanyl overdose deaths, a decrease in prescription opioid deaths, and the ongoing implementation of Obamacare provisions all began in 2015.
The CDC identified a 72.2 percent increase in deaths due to fentanyl and other synthetic opioids between 2014 and 2015. Over that same period, deaths from heroin increased 20.6 percent, but deaths from natural or semi-synthetic opioids increased only 2.6 percent, an order of magnitude less than deaths from heroin. Meanwhile, deaths from methadone decreased.
Sixty-four thousand people died of opioid overdoses in 2016, the year before Trump took office. In 2017, he declared the crisis a public health emergency and has since donated his presidential salary on multiple occasions to organizations involved in the fight against opioids. He has also turned his attention to cutting off addiction at its source by stemming unnecessary and imprudent opioid prescriptions, keeping deadly synthetic opioids off the streets, expanding access to live-saving drugs, and cutting the flow of illegally trafficked heroin into the country.
Trump proposed a plan to curb prescriptions and trafficking in 2018, including a “Safer Prescribing Plan” intended to cut opioid prescriptions by a third that year. He did not limit himself to awareness campaigns, as he increased legal penalties for those who traffic in fentanyl (and, somewhat infamously, proposed capital punishment for drug traffickers in extreme cases). His holistic approach also involved the use of the FDA to shut down websites that sold opioids with no oversight, often from abroad, and to inspect mail flows for the illegal shipment of opioids.
Then came the sanctions and drug busts to limit the deadliest opioids’ access to the American public. The U.S. Treasury heavily sanctioned known Chinese fentanyl traffickers. Law enforcement agents reported hauling in astronomical amounts of Chinese fentanyl meant for the U.S. black market. One drug bust, in August 2019, yielded enough fentanyl to kill 14 million people.
Shutting down the flow of Chinese fentanyl into the United States required at least some acknowledgment from China that their country was part of the problem. When Trump first declared opioid addiction a national emergency, China was too busy issuing bigoted statements about American culture to have time to help. “As many states decriminalize marijuana, the public’s attitudes and trends of thinking toward drugs will also have a bad effect,” Yu Haibin of the China National Narcotics Control Commission, the top drug official in the communist regime, said in December 2017, blaming a “lax cultural attitude” for the opioid crisis. “The United States should look within to cut down demand for opioids which are fueling its deadly drug crisis rather than stressing unsubstantiated claims that China is the major source of these chemicals.”
After two years of an emboldened policy toward China—one that elevated the concerns of allies like Taiwan, condemned China’s human rights atrocities on the world stage, and forced China into difficult trade negotiations—Beijing finally admitted that its fentanyl production was as prodigious as suggested and agreed to help the Trump administration limit its distribution. The Communist Party has never met a promise it isn’t willing to break, so the agreement is far from a victory, but for a country as obsessed with reputation as China, the admission and agreement was a significant step forward.
Policies on the southern border also helped limit the influx of heroin and fentanyl into the United States. President Trump campaigned largely on a promise to secure the border from the menace of wealthy violent Mexican drug cartels operating on the other side. The wall may not yet be built, but millions of dollars’ worth of fentanyl and heroin, including the arrest of one individual caught with enough fentanyl to kill 500,000 people, will no longer make it to the American black market.
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2.
President Trump Has Allocated More Funding to Historically Black Colleges and Universities Than Any Other President
In May 2017, President Trump promised “unwavering support” for the nation’s historically black colleges and universities (HBCUs). By the time he had made that declaration, the president had already signed an executive order establishing the White House Initiative to Promote Excellence and Innovation at Historically Black Colleges and Universities. The order made HBCUs part of a White House federal initiative, shifting responsibility from the Department of Education. It also established the President’s Board of Advisors on HBCUs. “With this executive order, we will make HBCUs a priority in the White House—an absolute priority,” Trump said during a February 2017 signing ceremony. “A lot of people are going to be angry that they’re not a priority, but that’s OK,” Trump told the presidents of nearly 100 HBCUs gathered in the Oval Office.
The measure was merely the first of many moves President Trump would make to prioritize funding for America’s 102 HBCUs.
“In March 2018, the Trump administration provided financial relief to HBCUs impacted by Hurricanes Katrina and Rita that struck the Gulf Coast in 2005,” Black Enterprise reported. “Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos issued full forgiveness of loans in the amount of $322 million to Dillard University, Southern University at New Orleans, Tougaloo College, and Xavier University of Louisiana under the HBCU Hurricane Supplemental Loan program. The monies saved can be repurposed to provide tuition assistance and expansion of curriculum, where feasible.” The rule kicked off instant condemnation from consumer advocates.
“She was genuinely interested in working on our behalf,” said Walter Kimbrough, president of Dillard University in New Orleans, which received loan relief thanks to DeVos’s decision. “That’s their big win,” he said of the administration’s work with HBCUs. President Trump continued to support a historically black college and university system that had been weakened in recent years. College closures, declining enrollment, and scant finances contributed to the rising risk of these schools losing their accreditation. Trump vowed to break the logjam in Congress over the funding for HBCUs. By the end of 2018, he had appropriated more than $360 million to HBCUs. The massive figure put him in the record books as having allocated more money to HBCUs than any other president in history.
In December 2019, President Trump signed a bipartisan bill, known as the FUTURE Act. The law permanently reauthorized hundreds of millions of dollars in federal funding to historically black colleges and universities. The Trump-signed bill also simplified the process of the Free Application for Federal Student Aid (FAFSA) by eliminating more than twenty questions from the application form and simplifying the repayment process for roughly eight million borrowers. “When I took office, I promised to fight for HBCUs, and my administration continues to deliver,” Trump said at the time. “A few months ago, funding for HBCUs was in jeopardy. But the White House and Congress came together and reached a historic agreement.”
Michael Lomax, the president and CEO of the United Negro College Fund (UNCF), praised the president and the thousands of advocates responsible for getting the legislation becoming law. “We enlisted more than 20,000 supporters to write and call their members of Congress. This activated army of advocates became the front line of support for HBCUs, and they won the battle for our institutions,” Lomax said.
UNCF senior vice president for public policy and government affairs Lodriguez Murray also showered President Trump with praise. “The last time a law like this passed and was signed in this manner was nineteen years ago this month,” said Murray. “Standalone bills like the FUTURE Act that focus solely on minority populations and have a substantial benefit to HBCUs rarely pass Congress like this. They usually become part of larger, must-pass pieces of legislation; however, the FUTURE Act stood on its own two feet. The Minority Health and Health Disparities Research and Education Act of 2000, Public Law 106–525, was the last bill to become law like the FUTURE Act. This is a once-a-generation occurrence, and UNCF couldn’t be prouder to make a difference for HBCUs and our students.”
The bill would restore roughly $255 million in annual fun...
