“There’s a tremendous amount to like here,” said Bradley Stein, director of RAND’s Opioid Policy Center. “The magnitude of the investment really matches the needs of the crisis. A lot of the investment prior to this everyone has recognized as being insufficient or a drop in the bucket. For a crisis of this magnitude, it’s going to take that type of investment.”
Stein described the proposal as “so many orders of magnitude greater than any of the investments we’ve seen to date” because they “occur over a much longer period, which I think in many ways — if you think about needing to build the infrastructure — we really need to have with respect to treatment and some of the harm reduction activities.”
Dr. Ryan Marino, emergency medicine physician and medical toxicologist at the University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine, highlighted the proposal’s emphasis on social determents like housing and access to medical care and education.
“It’s really encouraging to see someone of her statue on the national stage in our federal government promoting life-saving methods that haven’t been promoted to this point,” Marino told Yahoo Finance, highlighting “her big emphasis on recovery and medicines for treating addiction, which haven’t been as well emphasized at the federal level.”