President Trump’s Opportunity to Gut Regulations That Harm Effective Drug Policy

Support for President Trump is highly correlated with living in a region stricken by what are being called “deaths by despair”: skyrocketing rates of suicide, alcohol-related fatalities and most notably, relentlessly rising deaths from opioid overdose. These often-rural areas have been hit hard by job losses, with high unemployment and shredded social fabric. Not surprisingly, the overdose epidemic came up repeatedly over the course of the election — largely through questions from voters — starting from the very first primaries.