President Donald Trump missed the opportunity to take a federal stand against opioids in one of the nation's most addicted towns, the mayor of Huntington, West Virginia, said Friday.

Three days after his Commission on Combating Drug Addiction and the Opioid Crisis asked him to declare it a national emergency, Trump on Thursday held a campaign rally in the Appalachian town, where he did not mention the drugs once. Instead, he congratulated the state's governor for defecting to the Republican Party, pushed for the revival of the coal industry, criticized his former rival Hillary Clinton and downplayed the special counsel probe into Russia's interference in the 2016 presidential election.

Huntington Mayor Steve Williams, a Democrat who has announced a congressional bid, said the rally fell short of his expectations, seeming more like Trump's presidential campaign events than a deeper conversation about how America will address the nation's addiction to opiates – a class of drugs ranging from prescription painkillers like oxycodone, morphine and hydrocodone to heroin.

"This is the single largest existential public health threat that we have ever faced, and we’re about to lose not just one generation but two generations," Williams said. "Everything that the president has said over time of wanting to make sure the tax code is encouraging investments and making sure that we’re putting people back to work and that we’re bringing manufacturing back – all of this stuff is linked to the opiate epidemic."

Approximately 91 Americans die every day from an opioid overdose, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. While the opioid crisis has infiltrated every state across the country, West Virginia has been one of the states hit hardest, with the highest rates of death due to drug overdose in 2015.

And Huntington, a town of nearly 50,000 situated in Cabell County, has one of the highest addiction rates. The Cabell-Huntington Health Department estimates that 10 percent of the residents it serves are addicted to opiates, Williams said. Plus, the county is spending about $100 million a year in health care costs related to its dependency.

To the outside observer, Wilson said, it may be surprising to find this town has a deeply rooted problem with drug addiction. Just this spring, Huntington was named "America's best community" in a nationwide competition against 350 other municipalities working to develop community-based revitalization plans. But the nation first turned its eyes to Huntington last August when reports came out that 28 people overdosed there within the span of six hours one afternoon. Two of the 28 died that day; the rest were revived by first responders with naloxone, an overdose-reversal drug.

"What’s happened in our community – and I’ve seen this around the nation – is that, in the cities and counties, it’s hitting people in their families, in their neighborhoods, in their churches, at work, and all of the sudden this isn’t happening to someone else," Williams said. "Having conversations like that around the country can say, 'This doesn’t have to be a death sentence.' This can give you the opportunity for everybody to be standing together."

The White House opioid commission's interim report provided the president with multiple recommendations on how to tackle the crisis, including funding for mental health and substance abuse treatment as well as for drug monitoring programs, supplying fentanyl detectors and naloxone to all local law enforcement and hospitals.

Williams, who participated in a national task force of 10 city and 10 county officials who came together, discussed and published recommendations in April 2016 on how to resolve the opiate pandemic locally, said the commission largely mirrored the group's recommendations, but missed one important one: the need for alternatives to incarceration.