Mr. Courtwright says that this was not a simple case of historical amnesia. In the earlier epidemic, doctors “made mistakes, but it was a bad situation to begin with,” he said. “There was no equivalent of Purdue Pharma flying you off to the Bahamas for the weekend to tell you about the wonders of these new drugs.”

WHAT SHOULD WE DO NOW?

The AIDS crisis might provide public officials some lessons for how to move forward. Like with opioids, the federal government responded to that epidemic by doing next to nothing for many years. But an organized movement led in part by people with H.I.V. and gay activists eventually forced Congress to create and fund new programs. For example, in 1990 Congress approved the Ryan White Care Act, a bipartisan bill that poured billions of dollars into providing treatment and support to people with H.I.V. By 1995, the federal government was spending $3.3 billion a year (about $5.4 billion today after adjusting for inflation) on AIDS efforts, not including billions spent through mandatory programs like Medicaid and Medicare, according to the Kaiser Family Foundation. That was up from just $116 million in 1985.

Though slow to act, Congress eventually treated AIDS as a complex, multidimensional problem and tackled it by funding prevention, treatment, support services and research. Lawmakers provided money to make expensive antiretroviral drugs accessible to more people and allocated money to help house people infected with H.I.V., recognizing that they needed more than just access to drugs.

Image AIDs activists demonstrating in New York in 1988. Credit... Allan Tannenbaum/Getty Images

Lawmakers so far have fallen far short of such a vigorous effort when it comes to opioid addiction. Congress has taken what can be considered only baby steps by appropriating a total of a few billion dollars of discretionary opioid funding in recent years. This funding amounts to a pittance relative to what is needed: substantial long-term funding for prevention, addiction treatment, social services and research. Andrew Kolodny, co-director of opioid policy research at Brandeis University, says at least $6 billion a year is needed for 10 years to set up a nationwide network of clinics and doctors to provide treatment with medicines like buprenorphine and methadone. Those drugs have a proven track record at reducing overdoses and giving people struggling with addiction a shot at a stable life. Today, large parts of the country have few or no clinics that offer medication-assisted treatment, according to an analysis by amfAR, a foundation that funds AIDS research.

Next, lawmakers need to remove regulations restricting access to buprenorphine, an opioid that can be used to get people off stronger drugs like heroin; its use is unlikely to end in an overdose. Doctors who want to prescribe the drug have to go through eight hours of training, and the government limits the number of patients they can treat. These limits have made the drug harder to obtain and created a situation in which it is easier to get the kinds of opioids that caused this crisis than to get medicine that can help addicts. France reduced heroin overdoses by nearly 80 percent by making buprenorphine easily available starting in 1995. Yet many American lawmakers and government officials have resisted removing restrictions on buprenorphine, arguing it replaces one addiction with another. Some of the same people have also stood in the way of wider availability of naloxone, which can help reverse overdoses, and opposed harm-reduction approaches like supervised drug consumption sites, where users can get clean needles and use drugs under the watch of staff who are trained to reverse overdoses.