A US senator is calling on President-elect Donald Trump to launch an assault in the fight against the opioid crisis in his home state of West Virginia.

“We need to declare a war on drugs,” Sen. Joe Manchin (D-WV) said in an interview Tuesday on CNN’s “The Lead With Jake Tapper.”

Drug users “started out as a kid, you know, smoking occasional recreational marijuana and then that led in to prescriptions taken out of their parents’ or grandparents’ medicine cabinet and become a ‘cool kid’ and before you know it, it turned into where they just were hooked,” Manchin added, claiming to describe the cycle of a drug abuser.

“Heroin comes on. … Now, we have the fentanyl coming on and it’s just been unbelievable,” he said.

Manchin’s public plea to Trump comes days after a Gazette-Mail report found that 780 million hydrocodone and oxycodone pills have been shipped to the state in the last six years — amounting to 433 pills per person.

In that time, 1,728 people in West Virginia have fatally overdosed, the stunning report found.

The term “war on drugs” is not a new one — and mirrors the policy President Richard Nixon implemented in 1971.