Pa. health secretary: ‘Sustainable funding’ needed to attack opioid crisis

As Congress grapples with how to tackle the opioid epidemic, Pennsylvania’s top health official said Tuesday that long-term funding for states is key to helping drive down overdose death rates.

“What we’re going to need is sustainable funding over the next five to 10 years to deal with this opioid crisis, to deal with aspects of prevention, rescue and then treatment,” said Dr. Rachel Levine, the secretary of health in Pennsylvania, a state the opioid epidemic has hit particularly hard.

Earlier this year, Congress passed a two-year budget deal that included $6 billion to address the opioid crisis and mental health.

“It’s a huge public health problem, and we simply are not meeting it with the bluntness and plain-spokenness and dollars that we need to,” Sen. Sherrod Brown (D-Ohio) said at an event Tuesday hosted by The Hill and sponsored by Everfi and the Prescription Drug Safety Network.{mosads}

Brown, as well as Sen. Shelley Moore Capito (R-W.Va.), detailed efforts underway to pass opioid legislation this year, saying it’s an issue Republicans and Democrats have been able to come together on even in a hyperpartisan Congress.

The event largely centered around youth awareness and prevention.

Adolescents are more vulnerable to addiction, according to Dr. Frances Jensen, the Department of Neurology chairwoman at the University of Pennsylvania’s Perelman School of Medicine.

They are like “Ferraris with weak brakes,” she said.

“They can get addicted harder, longer, stronger, faster and yet they don’t have a frontal lobe to talk back to them to say ‘that’s a bad idea, don’t do that.’ ”

Levine said the most effective programs to teach students about addiction are ones that integrate the course material throughout the school curriculum and “talk about how to cope with the enormous stresses that young people feel in our society, particularly with social media.”

“The ones that basically come in and give a very scary message one day about drugs or any other type of topic is not effective.”