Massachusetts Senator Elizabeth Warren is causing a stir in Trump country. In a rural West Virginia town with a population of 400, Warren spoke to a crowd of 150—many decked out in MAGA paraphernalia—about the opioid crisis. “Anyone here know someone who’s been caught in the grips of addiction?” Warren asked. Nearly every hand shot up.

“I have a plan for that” has become an unofficial motto for Warren’s idea-heavy candidacy. The policy pacesetter of the Democratic primary, Warren has already released detailed plans to break-up Big Tech, cancel student loan debt, and provide universal childcare via a tax on multimillionaires. Warren’s latest proposal, her thirteenth, would devote $100 billion over ten years to fighting the opioid crisis.

On Friday and Saturday last week, Warren traveled through rural areas (the small towns of Kermit, West Virginia and Chillicothe, Ohio) and big cities (Columbus and Cincinnati, Ohio) that have been hit hard by opioid and narcotic abuse. There she discussed her plan, which is based in part on the government’s response to HIV/AIDS in 1990, and would put funding toward improving addiction treatment and other efforts aimed at reducing overdose deaths. “There’s a tremendous amount to like here,” Bradley Stein, director of RAND’s Opioid Policy Center, told Yahoo. “The magnitude of the investment really matches the needs of the crisis,” he said, noting that previous expenditures were “a drop in the bucket.”



Warren’s plan has won plaudits from rural voters, who many in the party believe Democrats have to win back to defeat Donald Trump. But her opioid policy is a relative rarity in the Democratic field. The majority of the now two-dozen candidates in the race may have embraced some version of Medicare for All, but only Warren and Amy Klobuchar (who has a less specific $100 billion plan to fight drug and alcohol dependence) have made addiction a focal point of their campaigns. This is a mistake. Prescription drug addiction—and the illicit narcotic abuse to which it can often lead—is a serious issue for voters across the country.



It’s also, as Warren’s plan makes clear, a corruption issue: Several pharmaceutical companies have gotten rich off of this problem. If Democrats are actually serious about taking on both corruption and health care reform—arguably the two most dominant issues in the upcoming election—Warren’s message is a good place to start.

