The Obama administration is putting a new plan into place in an effort to deal with America's ongoing heroin crisis.
Attorney General Loretta Lynch spoke exclusively with USA Today this week and talked about the administration's latest push to curb the country's staggering heroin epidemic. In a report published on Friday morning, Lynch discussed the Justice Department's new effort to reduce the number of opioid-related deaths, which numbers nearly 100 every day, during the final few months of Obama's term.
Part of that plan includes "placing greater emphasis on identifying links between over-prescribing doctors and distribution networks across the country," and part of it involves urging each of the country's 94 U.S. attorney offices to share more information about physician prescription abuse across state lines. USA Today reports that Lynch has outlined these points in a memo, which will be distributed to each U.S. attorney's office next week.
"I'm not calling anybody out, because I think the people who look at this problem realize quickly how devastating it has been to families, to communities, to public health dollars, to law enforcement resources,'' Lynch told USA Today. "There is no one magic bullet for this.''
The U.S. Drug Enforcement Agency released a report in June that detailed the country's struggles with heroin. It reported that heroin use has tripled between 2007 and 2014, increasing from 161,000 reported cases of use to 435,000. And death from synthetic opioids increased nearly 80 percent in just one year from 2013 to 2014. The report also noted that heroin use is particularly high in the Northeast, Mid-Atlantic, and Midwest regions of the U.S.
"We tend to overuse words such as 'unprecedented' and 'horrific,' but the death and destruction connected to heroin and opioids is indeed unprecedented and horrific," the DEA's acting administrator Chuck Rosenberg said at the time. "The problem is enormous and growing, and all of our citizens need to wake up to these facts."
