A door is painted with the message to stop selling heroin on a street in a neighborhood with a high rate of poverty and illegal drug use on October 14, 2016, in New York City. | Spencer Platt/Getty Images
American policymakers should look beyond defeating the coronavirus.
Throughout the Covid-19 pandemic, there’s been a lot of talk about going back to “normal.” And while going back to a pre-coronavirus era would be a tremendous improvement for everyone, there are reminders all around us that it also wouldn’t be good enough.
A clear example is America’s opioid epidemic. Before Covid-19, the US suffered a record 70,630 drug overdose deaths in 2019. That amounted to a 5 percent increase from 2018, and erased the entire drop in overdose deaths reported from 2017 to 2018.
