The opioid disaster in this country can now be measured by the average life expectancy of 320 million Americans. According to a recent study by the National Center for Health Statistics of the U.S. Centers For Disease Control and Prevention, life expectancy in this country has gone down for the second straight year, even though it’s increasing in other rich countries. Drug deaths are the main culprit and the opioid crisis is the major driver of those deaths.

What are the Republicans and Democrats doing about opioid addiction, which has hit many American towns and communities like a medieval plague? Well, not so much.

Republicans are celebrating passage of their tax legislation like a city whose team won the Super Bowl for the first time. But lost in the confetti, champagne and post-game parties is the fact that, while architects, engineers and oil drillers in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge will benefit from the bill, there are no provisions for freeing up the resources needed to fight opioid and other drug addiction.

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President Trump Donald John TrumpSteele Dossier sub-source was subject of FBI counterintelligence probe Pelosi slams Trump executive order on pre-existing conditions: It 'isn't worth the paper it's signed on' Trump 'no longer angry' at Romney because of Supreme Court stance MORE had an opportunity to put the opioid crisis at the top of the national agenda by declaring a national emergency. But at crunch time, he only declared a public health emergency, which meant no specific funding for the opioid crisis, which kills 90 Americans each day.

Evidently, the Trump administration didn’t want to spend money to fight the opioid epidemic that could better be spent on such things as tax breaks for people who own certain types of commercial real estate entities (like Trump). Trump’s most profound comment on the opioid disaster was that “if they don’t start, they won’t have a problem.”

One post-election analysis found that most of the Ohio and Pennsylvania counties that went from President Obama in 2012 to Trump in 2016 had very high drug overdose death rates. Trump, those are your people you are leaving on the battlefield.

Democrats, apparently lacking imaginative faculties sufficient to grasp the humanitarian and political implications, devote themselves to the Dreamers and the Children’s Health Insurance Program but give little prominence to the opioid crisis. Without giving up on these worthy projects, Democrats could have seized a signature blue collar issue from Trump by demanding hundreds of billions to fight the opioid crisis and other drug addiction over the next few decades. Yes, sometimes you have to throw money at problems. Due in significant part to federal funding, new HIV infections have fallen in the U.S. by two-thirds since their peak in the mid-1980s.

But in July when the Democrats announced their “Better Deal” policy strategy for the 2018 elections and beyond, the strategy document did not address the opioid crisis. The forum for their announcement was Berryville, Virginia in the northern Shenandoah Valley, which has been hit hard by opioids and other drug abuse. In 2012 there was only one death in the region from a drug overdose; little over half-way through 2017, there were 28 opioid deaths, a rate nearly double that of 2016. Crimes like larceny, fraud, embezzlement and burglary are increasing because of the opioid epidemic; foster care is doing robust business because so many addicted parents can no longer care for their children; and “substance-exposed” newborn babies are on the rise.

But, standing in the midst of an unfolding humanitarian disaster, Democrats like Senate Minority Leader Chuck E. Schumer (N.Y.) and House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi Nancy PelosiPelosi slams Trump executive order on pre-existing conditions: It 'isn't worth the paper it's signed on' On The Money: Anxious Democrats push for vote on COVID-19 aid | Pelosi, Mnuchin ready to restart talks | Weekly jobless claims increase | Senate treads close to shutdown deadline Trump signs largely symbolic pre-existing conditions order amid lawsuit MORE (Calif.) applauded their Better Deal program, which had a plank for “Lowering the Cost of Prescription Drug,” but not for prescription drug abuse.

The last time life expectancy dropped two years in a row in this country was in 1962-63 when the country had a bad flu season. The CDC predicts that the opioid crisis will likely cause a third consecutive annual decline in life expectancy. The last time that happened was a century ago in the Spanish flu epidemic of 1918, which killed more than 675,000 Americans.

Gregory J. Wallance is a lawyer and writer in New York. He is the author of the forthcoming “The Woman Who Fought An Empire: Sarah Aaronsohn and Her Nili Spy Ring” (March 2018), follow on Twitter @gregorywallance.