Just over 100 days in office: That's approximately 9,100 people who have died from drug overdoses, especially opioid pain pills, heroin and fentanyl.

Perhaps your attention to a major public health problem has been lost as you labor to reduce taxes for the very wealthy, strip or make financially inaccessible health insurance for millions of Americans and promote policies that foster more global warming from fossil fuels? But President Donald Trump, the people dying are your base – those middle-Americans who voted for you and who have been the most hard hit from the opioid epidemic. These are the now often unemployed men whose chronic pain from years of labor coupled with overprescribing of opioids has them facing a grim future riddled with addiction and absent of hope.

I understand you have tasked the generally absent governor of New Jersey, Chris Christie, with leading a presidential commission on the opioid epidemic. But the United States surgeon general you recently dismissed already gave this country a thorough report last fall on the epidemic and what must be done about it. Of course, he was a member of the Obama gang, but he also is a brilliant public health doctor whose mission knows no partisanship.

Perhaps you imagine that the answers to the overdose deaths that will continue to stain your next 100 days, and then some, will be delivered by Attorney General Jeff Sessions and a criminalizing approach to drug addiction. But that would mean jailing and imprisoning your base.

Or perhaps you hope that the new acting head of the White House Office of Drug Control Policy, Richard Baum, will better limit the flow of illegal opioids into this country with a policy of get tough on cartels. His determination will no doubt be great, but efforts to control the flow into and distribution of drugs in this country have never worked over time. China and Russia, not just Mexico, have discovered how lucrative the market is and how to defy border interdiction and local seizure efforts. When busts happen, as they do, they barely make a dent in profits and the flow of drugs to our cities and towns goes uninterrupted.

And how, Mr. President, can we believe your commitment to saving lives that will be lost to opioid addiction when your health care policy efforts, and Obamacare repeal in particular, are aiming to eliminate the "essential benefit" in the Affordable Care Act that requires insurers to cover mental and substance use disorders? Treatment works for these conditions, but only if a person, and their family, can afford to use it.

We don't need a commission to spend months at best, but likely longer, studying the issue, while a different form of "carnage" accrues – namely, the unceasing body count from the opioid epidemic. These are your bodies to save, or not.

There is abundant evidence for what works: prevention (especially in youth); physician drug monitoring program; early detection of problem drug use; treatment (including counseling and medication assisted treatments like buprenorphine and long-acting naltrexone); the universal dissemination of life-saving Narcan, which reverses overdose-related respiratory arrest; and de-stigmatizing substance use disorders rather than making criminal pariahs of people with these conditions.