Hillary Clinton has unveiled a $10bn plan to help contain substance abuse across America, as the nation grapples in particular with a growing opioid crisis that in some states cost more than 1,000 deaths last year.



The Democratic presidential candidate on Wednesday laid out an approach to tackling both drug and alcohol addiction that shifts the emphasis away from incarceration and toward treatment, and would bolster preventative programming at the state and community level. Clinton’s plan would notably invest $7.5bn in funding toward new federal-state partnerships over 10 years, under which states that present a comprehensive plan for treating substance abuse could qualify for a grant from the federal government.

“It’s time we recognize that there are gaps in our health care system that allow too many to go without care – and invest in treatment,” Clinton wrote in an op-ed in the in the New Hampshire Union Leader late on Tuesday that previewed her proposals.

“This is not new. We’re not just now ‘discovering’ this problem. But we should be saying enough is enough,” she wrote. “It’s time we recognize as a nation that for too long, we have had a quiet epidemic on our hands. Plain and simple, drug and alcohol addiction is a disease, not a moral failing – and we must treat it as such.”

Substance abuse has emerged as a key issue in the 2016 presidential contest, especially in the early voting state of New Hampshire where state officials have dubbed the heroin epidemic “the Ebola of northern New England”. Clinton noted in her op-ed that she did not envision drug abuse would become a major tenet of her presidential campaign, but through her travels to states like New Hampshire she heard about just how pressing the issue had become.

The former secretary of state started to address addiction more frequently on the campaign trail in the early months of the summer, citing conversations with voters in Iowa about meth and prescription drug abuse and heroin abuse in New Hampshire.

“This is tearing families apart, but it is below the surface,” Clinton said during a campaign stop in Iowa in May. “People aren’t talking about it, because it’s something that is hard to deal with.”

The opiate epidemic claimed 326 lives in New Hampshire in 2014, and at least 200 more lives this year so far, Tym Rourke, the chair of the New Hampshire governor’s commission on alcohol and drug abuse prevention, treatment and recovery, told reporters on a Wednesday conference call hosted by the Clinton campaign.

“For far too long, we as a society have not had the adequate resources or the adequate infrastructure to attack this disorder as a public health threat,” Rourke said. “We as a nation are at a tipping point where we must address this issue in a comprehensive, robust way, at the highest levels of government.”

New Hampshire is both a critical early voting state in the 2016 primaries, as well as a key battleground state in the general election. Several state officials there, who have been inundated with visits by presidential candidates from both parties, have said they routinely raise the threat posed by heroin addiction in an effort to raise more urgency around the issue among campaigns.

Candidates on both sides have spoken about the heroin crisis in New Hampshire, but Clinton is the first to roll out a comprehensive proposal for how to fight the epidemic. Clinton’s campaign said her plan would also involve “immediate federal action” – namely by ensuring that a 2008 statute requiring insurance plans to treat substance abuse disorders with parity is enforced so that individuals with such disorders are not discriminated against.

David Dubois, a sheriff for Strafford County, New Hampshire, who was also on Wednesday’s conference call said the insurance piece was “extremely important”.

“Based on our experience, people who are in need of treatment find many roadblocks in terms of insurance issues,” Dubois said.



Republican presidential candidate Chris Christie also cast a spotlight on the state’s crisis on Wednesday in a television ad, in which the New Jersey governor extended his pro-life views to the need to take drug abuse head-on.

“I believe that every life is precious – not only for the baby in the womb. We need to be pro-life for the 16-year-old drug addict who’s laying on the floor of the county jail,” Christie said in the ad, which stresses treatment.

Christie signed a series of bills into law in February to deal with heroin treatment in New Jersey, where heroin and opioid use has resulted in more than 5,000 deaths over the past decade. The pieces of legislation signed by Christie put in place a requirement that substance abuse centers submit performance reports; extended immunity to emergency responders and needle-exchange program employees who administer the anti-opioid drug Narcan; and mandated that state agencies provide mental health and substance abuse services to inmates in state prisons.