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On Tuesday, the Congressional House Oversight Committee held a Field Hearing at Johns Hopkins Hospital. I was invited to testify on Baltimore City’s work in combatting the opioid epidemic. Other witnesses included Governor Chris Christie (Chair of the President’s Commission on Combating Drug Addiction and the Opioid Crisis) and ONDCP Acting Director Richard Baum. Mayor Pugh and Governor Hogan gave remarks as well (the link to the full event is here).

Baltimore has done a lot with limited resources. In my testimony, I discussed Baltimore’s aggressive, three-pillar approach to combatting this epidemic: Save lives with naloxone, expand access to on-demand addiction treatment, and reduce stigma and prevent addiction. I also addressed four things the President’s Commission should have included in their recommendations: Substantial, additional federal funding; health insurance expansion; guaranteed access to treatment for addition; and evidence-based harm reduction practices, including needle exchange programs. Treating addiction as a crime is unscientific, inhumane, and ineffective. In order to save lives, we must also address the stigma surrounding addiction.

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Life expectancy in 14 of Baltimore’s predominantly Black neighborhoods is now lower than North Korea’s, notes Jim Grossfeld in the American Prospect. This is true even though, as Grossfeld points out, Baltimore is home to Johns Hopkins, which, Grossfeld observes, “Together with the Mayo Clinic and the Cleveland Clinic…is part of the trinity of top-ranked US hospitals—a latter-day Lourdes to which sick people from around the world beat a path, hoping to find cures they’ll find nowhere else.” 

The Baltimore City Health Department, in its “Healthy Baltimore 2020: A Blueprint for Health” report, points out that “although 97 percent of health-care dollars are spent on the health-care system, only 10 percent of what determines life expectancy actually happens ‘within the four walls of a clinic.’ The other 90 percent is decided upstream, where people live, work, go to school, and spend their free time.”

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