Hillary Clinton, in a visit to West Virginia last Tuesday, gave her support to a proposed tax to prescription opioid medication, and the proceeds would be used to fund substance abuse treatment all over the United States.
Senator Joe Manchin proposed the 1 cent fee per milligram on active opioid ingredients in a prescription pain capsule “to be paid by the manufacturer or importer” of said drugs as part of a new amendment to the Comprehensive Addiction and Recovery Act of last year (CARA) Clinton commented on Manchin’s plan saying it was a, “great idea.”
Manchin says the proposed opioid tax would collect up to $2 billion every year. the money would go straight to treatment centers who specialize in opioid addiction. Also included in the proposal is a rebate for opiates prescribed for cancer related pain and hospice patients as well as opioids used in medically-assisted treatment.
“I said, ‘You know what, we’ve got an alcohol tax on alcohol, we have a tobacco tax,’” Manchin stated. “So I said, ‘Why don’t we have a one penny per milligram for every manufactured pharmaceutical that manufactures any opiates, just opiates?”
West Virginia maintains the largest rate of overdoses in the country, at 33.5 deaths per 100,000 people, as published in a 2015 study by the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation.
Clinton created a $10 billion plan to address the opioid epidemic in September of last year.The aid in funding would “help states have a different approach to dealing with this epidemic,” said Clinton in the Democratic debate back in January.
“We have to move away from treating the use of drugs as a crime and instead, move it to where it belongs, as a health issue,” said Clinton. “And we need to divert more people from the criminal justice system into drug courts, into treatment, and recovery.”
To read the full article on The Fix click HERE
The post Hillary Clinton Supports Opiate Tax appeared first on Paradigm Malibu.