Election Day 2016 has come and gone. It’s unbelievable on several levels—especially after all the headlines predicting Doomsday if either candidate won. (Spoiler alert: one of them did win and we’re all still here.) It doesn’t feel like the day should’ve ever arrived, given a year riddled with more arguments, scandals, lies, doubts, calculated bomb drops, and character assassination than a season of Bravo’s Vanderpump Rules. But it’s passed—and with it, so has one of the most toxic, contentious election seasons ever. So as Twitter cools off, Reddit calms down and our Facebook feeds slowly return to kitten memes, here’s a look at how the Trump Administration will likely approach not only health care and substance abuse, but the very future of recovery in America.
“A Tremendous Problem”
Even greater than the “war on drugs” in America is what the CDC considers to be our #1 problem: the national epidemic of opioid addiction. Every single day, nearly 80 Americans die because of a heroin or painkiller overdose. Donald Trump’s stance on opioid addiction treatment is as unclear as it is strangely aggressive. While he observed that opioids are “a tremendous problem,” he didn’t discuss the topic much on the campaign trail, let alone detail any plan to deal with it. By contrast, Clinton outlined a “five-point plan” that would’ve armed cities and states with tools to combat the problem at the local level. Still, while Trump hasn’t yet laid out a specific solution, he weighed in with an intense tweet this past August: “Heroin overdoses are taking over our children and others in the MIDWEST. Coming in from our southern border. We need strong border & WALL!” (By now, we’re all familiar with the infamous wall.) In under 140 characters, he captured the bold if not fantastical tone he takes with most every issue he’s addressed during the campaign.
Stopping drugs from coming over the border is the only true way out of the dark, Trump believes. (He’s clearly zeroed in on the Drug Enforcement Administration’s conclusion that 79% of the heroin it’s analyzed comes from Mexico.) For many Americans, though, the addiction genie is already out of the bottle. The damage is done. And while an enormous wall may curb addiction in all the same ways that Clinton’s vision for preventative programs could have worked, it doesn’t address the current problem plaguing our communities. It bears reminding that during the primaries, many Republicans argued for increased criminalization and fewer harm reduction programs. Trump’s views, by comparison, are somewhat tame.
Waging the Real War
When it comes to the country’s overall “war on drugs,” Trump agrees with almost every other candidate that it’s a losing battle. In fact, it’s one of the very few areas where his beliefs align with Clinton’s. That doesn’t mean he’s always had the same opinion, though. As he sees it, the war is simply a matter of economics—but one that’s fraught with complication. “You have to legalize drugs to win that war,” he argued in a 1990 speech. “You have to take the profit away from these drug czars.” That money would then be spent on drug education programs. Also, back then, he called US drug enforcement efforts “a joke” and blamed our drug problem on politicians who “don’t have any guts.” Since his 1990 speech, his opinion on drugs has dramatically shifted: he’s now against legalizing recreational marijuana, though he appears to be open to learning more about it.
Like Clinton, he too supports medical marijuana. At the 2015 Democratic Primary in Las Vegas, Clinton’s sentiments seemed to echo Trump’s: “I think that we have the opportunity through the states that are pursuing recreational marijuana to find out a lot more than we know today,” she said. “I do support the use of medical marijuana, and I think even there we need to do a lot more research so that we know exactly how we’re going to help people for whom medical marijuana provides relief.” And, like Clinton, Trump advocates a state-by-state approach when it comes to marijuana. Speaking at the 2015 Conservative Political Action Conference, Trump referred to Colorado and Oregon as little more than case studies to pay longer-term attention to. “There’s a question as to how it’s all working out there, you know? That’s not going exactly trouble-free,” he said, cautioning other states against taking similar legislation. “If they vote for it, they vote for it. But they’ve got a lot of problems going on right now in Colorado—some big, big problems.” Regardless, now that California, Massachusetts and Nevada just passed laws legalizing recreational marijuana, Trump has no choice but to pay attention.
What Will Recovery Look Like?
President-elect Trump is no stranger to the destruction of addiction: his brother died from alcoholism in 1984 at the age of 43. What’s more, Trump has apparently never touched cigarettes, alcohol, or even a cup of coffee, according to a New York Times feature. (This is, of course, assuming we can ignore those allegations that he was high on the white witch during the penultimate debate.) Yet, when it comes to drug treatment, prosecution and recovery, a lot of questions now hang in the air. One of the cornerstones of Trump’s campaign is his promise to repeal Obamacare before it becomes a “trillion-ton weight that finally takes down our economy forever,” as he’s said a number of times. Instead, he envisions a privatized healthcare system that gets rid of the “artificial lines around every state” and helps to “take care of the people who can’t take care of themselves.” His proposed system, like Clinton’s, will include coverage for addiction treatment and education programs.
And while Clinton had also long fought for a universal health care system—one that treated substance abuse as a chronic disease—Trump, too, is a big supporter of universal health care: “I’m a conservative on most issues but a liberal on health,” he said. “It is an unacceptable but accurate fact that the number of uninsured Americans has risen to 42 million. Working out detailed plans will take time. But the goal should be clear: Our people are our greatest asset. We must take care of our own.” Also, just like Clinton, he wants to get naloxone (the antidote to heroin) into the hands of first responders and establish local drug courts. Trump intends to aggressively go after drug traffickers, but he’s recently indicated that he might go easier on non-violent drug offenders. Unfortunately, only time will tell what Trump’s drug policy positions really are. If nothing else, though, one thing is crystal-clear: before anyone maps out the future of recovery, America probably needs to recover from this election first.
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