Tonight we’ll look into Hillary Clinton’s proposed policy set on addiction and substance use.
As Clinton says, “we’re not just now ‘discovering’ this problem.”
However, increasingly they’ve surged back to the forefront: both as a meth and opiate epidemic make the headlines — closer to home: Clinton herself has 5 family friends who’ve lost adult children to opiate overdose — and (more optimistically) as more and more movement is made towards a total conceptual reform in how these challenges are tackled.
From Hillary Clinton’s September 2015 op-ed in the New Hampshire Union Leader:
On my first trip to New Hampshire this spring, a retired doctor spoke up. I had just announced I was running for President, and I had traveled to Iowa and New Hampshire to hear from voters about their concerns, their hopes and their vision for the future. He said his biggest worry was the rising tide of heroin addiction in the state, following a wave of prescription drug abuse.
To be candid, I didn’t expect what came next. In state after state, this issue came up again and again — from so many people, from all walks of life, in small towns and big cities.
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It’s time we recognize that there are gaps in our health care system that allow too many to go without care — and invest in treatment. It’s time we recognize that our state and federal prisons, where 65 percent of inmates meet medical criteria for substance use disorders, are no substitute for proper treatment — and reform our criminal justice system.
Hillary’s plans to combat addiction and substance use are people-centered, and start with the idea of treating these issues as health issues first. All of her proposals on the subject stem from this fundamental core.
From the small-scale and technical (providing EMTs and other first responders with emergency anti-overdose treatments) to the large-scale and cultural (spanning both prevention to criminal justice reform) — as with so many issues, Hillary Clinton understands both the enormous scope of this issue, and what we need to do as a country to tackle it.
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