How Trump Administration Can Tackle America's Addiction Problems: Experts

Newsweek

2 days ago

Based on facts, either observed and verified firsthand by the reporter, or reported and verified from knowledgeable sources.
Newsweek AI is in beta. Translations may contain inaccuracies—please refer to the original content.
President Donald Trump has long been adamant about fixing what he described as America's "opioid crisis," something which was a key focus of his first term as president as well as his second.
The opioid crisis claimed the lives of over 80,000 Americans just last year, and that figure was a 27 percent decrease from the drug overdose death toll the previous year.
While drug overdose deaths fell sharply in 2024, with the steepest year-over-year decline in five years, there is still a high prevalence of substance use disorders in the country.
Drug addiction is recognized as a substance use disorder, a complex condition characterized by an individual's uncontrollable use of a substance despite its harmful consequences.
Substance use disorders are not specific to drug use and can also include a patient's relationship with alcohol, tobacco and even medications.
According to a 2023 report by the federal agency Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration (SAMHSA), 48.5 million Americans aged 12 and above have a substance use disorder. This equates to just over 17 percent of the population.
Among those with a substance use disorder, just over 27 million had a drug addiction specifically.
To prevent more lives from being lost to substance abuse, Trump has proposed major changes to be made to SAMHSA as well as other agencies, alongside cracking down on drug trafficking at the U.S.-Mexico border.
However, experts have weighed in on what they think should be done to tackle the issue, and their suggestions differ from what Republican policymakers are currently implementing.
Photo-illustration by Newsweek/Getty/Canva
What Has The Trump Administration Done To Tackle Addiction So Far?
In March 2025, the Health and Human Services Department (HHS) announced that major changes would be made to SAMHSA and that it would be combined with other agencies as part of the "Make America Healthy Again" (MAHA) campaign.
HHS wrote that the plan would increase the "operational efficiency" of SAMHSA, and more widely, the consolidation of various agencies would save taxpayers $1.8 billion per year through a reduction in workforce.
The streamlining of various agencies has allegedly led to a reduction of around 50 percent of the staff at SAMHSA so far, according to Paolo del Vecchio, the former Director of the Office of Recovery at SAMHSA, who spoke to the substance use disorder website Addiction Center.
When approached for comment, a SAMHSA spokesperson told Newsweek: "The SAMHSA employees affected were in administrative roles."
They added: "The agency remains committed to ensuring that essential mental health and substance use services are available to Americans in need. Our grants, programs, and initiatives continue to support the President's vision to Make America Healthy Again by addressing the critical behavioral health challenges facing our citizens."
There are also proposed cuts to various agencies as part of the GOP budget bill, which includes a $1 billion cut in funding for SAMHSA, according to Addiction Center.
Cuts to the agency's funding, the Trump administration allegedly said, are being proposed because "SAMHSA grants were used to fund dangerous activities billed as 'harm reduction,' which included funding 'safe smoking kits and supplies' and 'syringes' for drug users."
Newsweek has contacted the White House via email for comment from the Office of Management and Budget in regards to the budgetary changes to SAMHSA.
What Experts Think Needs To Be Done
However, despite the Trump administration's efforts to tackle the issue, experts have said that more needs to be done.
"To reduce the prevalence of substance use disorder, the Administration should invest in prevention to reduce the number of people who develop the disorder in the first place," Keith Humphreys OBE, the Esther Ting Memorial professor in the Department of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences at Stanford University, California, told Newsweek.
As substance use disorders often go hand-in-hand with other health conditions, "this also means that if you treat substance use disorder, you get benefits in other areas of health," he added.
"So Medicaid paying for addiction treatment over time may actually reduce costs to Medicaid as people with substance use disorders don't develop or resolve other health problems for which they would otherwise need care," Humphreys said.
Individuals with substance use disorders can develop other health problems like infectious diseases, injuries, and poor mental health, he said.
"It thus costs more to cover the health care for someone with a substance use disorder than without," Humphreys added.
Corroborating this, Peggy Quigg, a member of the President's Senior Service Advisors at the WestCare Foundation, a non-profit organization providing behavioral and mental health services in various locations throughout the country, told Newsweek that the effects of "long-term, chronic substance use takes a great toll on most of the organs in the body."
As patients seek help for substance use, she added, medical providers "often discover additional undiagnosed and untreated medical problems especially with the endocrine system, liver, pancreas, stomach, liver, lungs and brain."
The result of this is that those with substance use disorders have significantly higher costs than those without, so investing in preventative care could actually save costs in the long term.
Spending on Medicaid enrollees with a substance use disorder diagnosis is twice as much as those without—a difference of around $1,200 compared to $550 per month on average, according to KFF.
Humphreys added that alongside investment in treatment, there also needs to be "recovery services that lead people out of addiction and into a healthier life."
The need to invest, rather than make cuts to funding, within the sector is something Quigg also said was crucial.
"States and local communities have had successful programs in place that have just lost funding all across the country with the changes in the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention Department of Justice and the U.S. Attorneys Offices," she said.
She added that "study after study has demonstrated that prevention works, we need more of it, and it is cost-effective."
"We are at an extraordinary moment of opportunity in the drug overdose crisis as deaths are finally starting to come down in a meaningful way," Brendan Saloner, a professor of health policy and management at the John Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, Maryland, told Newsweek.
"Reducing the investment in treatment could completely undermine the recent progress we've seen as more people are getting treatment paid for with Medicaid funds," he added.