Trump declares commitment to ending opioid crisis ‘once and for all’

ATLANTA — President Trump told a meeting of health care professionals and addiction specialists on Wednesday that he was committed to ending the opioid crisis “once and for all,” adding, “that’s happening.”

“We will never stop until our job is done, and then maybe we’ll have to find something new,” he said at a drug abuse conference in Atlanta. “And I hope that’s going to be soon, but we will succeed.”

Many of the leading authorities on the opioid crisis have been highly critical of the federal government’s response, starting with the Obama administration, but say there has been some improvement under Trump.

Melania Trump traveled with her husband to Atlanta and addressed the conference before the president. She has made opioids one of her signature issues — particularly the toll the crisis takes on babies and mothers — and it is the one public policy initiative that she and her husband work on together.

But some critics say Trump has done a better job at framing the problem than dealing with it, as he has other issues, such as health care and addressing the migrant surge at the southwestern border.

Trump’s remarks soon pivoted to the strength of the economy and the hard work of Border Patrol agents monitoring the border for illicit drugs. He also praised drug-sniffing dogs.

“We’re going to have a wall. It’s going to be a very powerful wall,” he said, adding that it would have a “tremendous impact” on drugs coming into the country, even though most of the illegal drugs get smuggled through legal ports of entry.

Overdoses on prescription opioids have claimed more than 200,000 lives in the past 20 years, according to statistics from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, with an uptick in recent years in parts of the...