Trump’s Focus on Punishing Drug Dealers May Hurt Drug Users Trying to Quit

President Trump has long railed against drug traffickers. He has said they should be given the death penalty “for their heinous acts.” On the first day of his second term, he signed an executive order listing cartels as “terrorist organizations.”

But many public health and addiction experts fear that his budget proposals and other actions effectively punish people who use drugs and struggle with addiction.

The Trump administration has vowed to reduce overdose deaths, one of the country’s deadliest public health crises, by emphasizing law enforcement, border patrols and tariffs against China and Mexico to keep out fentanyl and other dangerous drugs. But it is also seeking huge cuts to programs that reduce drug demand.

The budget it submitted to Congress this month seeks to eliminate more than a billion dollars for national and regional treatment and prevention services. The primary federal agency addressing drug use, the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration, has so far lost about half its workers to layoffs under the Trump administration and is slated to be collapsed into the new Administration for a Healthy America, whose purview will reach far beyond mental illness and drug use.

And if reductions to Medicaid being discussed by Republicans in Congress are realized, millions of Americans will be unable to continue, much less start treatment.

The White House did not respond to requests for comment. The budget itself says that ending drug trafficking “starts with secure borders and a commitment to law and order” and that it is cutting addiction services deemed duplicative or “too small to have a national impact.”