Editorial: Declaring national emergency would help local communities fight opioid crisis

Is the country facing a national emergency over the opioid epidemic?

That's what a White House commission says in its recommendations to President Trump. The commission described the death toll as "September 11th every three weeks."

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention report that in 2015, more than 33,000 people died of opioid overdoses and another 20,000 died from other drugs. Opioid overdoses have quadrupled since 1999.

"Nobody is safe from this epidemic that threatens young and old, rich and poor, rural and urban," Trump said Tuesday as he prepared to meet on the topic.

Illinois is one of 19 states that the CDC says had a statistically significant increase in drug overdose deaths in 2015 compared with 2014. The 2016 national figures are not complete yet.

Locally, we have written much about the problem. Just this week, senior staff writer Marie Wilson detailed how fentanyl and synthetic opioids are contributing to more of the suburban overdose deaths beginning in 2016.

County coroners are on the front lines of this crisis. While heroin was the drug most focused on five years ago, it's the more potent fentanyl and synthetic opioids or a combination of all of these that are now leading to an increase in deaths, they report.

This information is important to discover, the coroners say, so any public health decisions - be they local or federal - can be made with as much detailed data as possible.

That may result in cost increases to do more involved testing, but it's important work that needs to be done.

"It will only get more complicated," said McHenry County Coroner Anne Majewski. "I think we'll see a cost increase because of the technology needed to design the tests."

If Trump follows his commission's recommendation, it's possible that local governments will get more federal funding to fight the opioid epidemic. That kind of financial assistance could go a long way in helping communities all across the country who are working to solve the problems they are facing and save lives.

"You have to do your due diligence," Kane County Coroner Rob Russell told Wilson, "in order to definitively determine a manner and a cause of death."

Once they can determine what is causing the death, be it heroin, fentanyl or a synthetic or a combination, then that data can be used to help guide efforts to combat its use and to warn youth, especially, about new dangers. That's the key.

"We're losing people who, they're young. I think they're unknowing," Majewski said. "Even though they understand drugs are potentially fatal, these people are addicted, and they don't know what they're going to get."