'We’ve been hit really hard': Student asks Booker how he'd address opioid crisis
A high school sophomore told Sen. Cory Booker she wouldn’t be old enough to vote in next year's presidential election, but she said her New Hampshire community needed more funding to fight substance abuse, including for support groups and rehabilitation facilities.
“We’ve been hit really hard by the substance abuse crisis,” the student — who was not identified in a video of the exchange but said she was in high school — told Booker following an event in Littleton, N.H. Citing her nearby town’s poverty rate and telling Booker that at least half of the students in her school qualified for free and reduced lunch, she asked what he would do as president to address the substance abuse crisis roiling the country.
“We don’t get resources, we don’t get money, and we’re just stuck in a rut,” she said.
Booker is hardly the first presidential candidate to be grilled over how to stanch the spread of the opioid crisis, which President Donald Trump has declared a public health emergency. The addiction epidemic has been one of the rare points of bipartisan agreement in Congress in recent years, and liberal firebrand Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) appeared to find support in a conservative area of West Virginia last week when she discussed the issue.
The brief but powerful interaction with Booker showed how young members of communities across the country have been pulled into the debate over how to end the crisis.
Before responding, Booker asked the student what solutions she would propose.
“We need more resources, we need funding, we need people to come up here and listen to people,” she began, outlining the need for addiction recovery support groups and better rehab facilities.
“We’ve only got like four rehabs in the entire state that are live-in, and three of them are men-only, and the one that is women-only has only like 17 beds or something like that,” she continued. “So we just need a lot of resources up here, and we’re not getting them.”
Booker noted that his hometown of Newark is also a low-income community suffering from the same issues.
“What I loved about your answer, which is mine, is it’s not one switch we’re going to flip. It has to be a comprehensive approach, and a lot more resources have to go into the gruesome crisis that’s going on in our communities,” he said.
Booker also emphasized the need to implement evidence-based solutions to the crisis, repeating his intention to go after pharmaceutical companies, which he asserted are responsible for the epidemic.
“It’s not just resources — we need to be investing heavily in evidence-based interventions that we know actually work,” he said. “At the point of overdose in a hospital, we know that if there’s a peer there, not an adult or authority figure, but a peer who’s been through it, that the rates of relapse go way down. We know we need to provide more beds for evidence-based programs that actually work. We know we need to do more prevention. We know we need to hold pharmaceutical companies responsible for pouring all these drugs in our communities.”
He said as mayor of Newark, he helped open the city’s first needle exchange center and said he was “fully in favor” of expanding programs such as safe injection sites, a highly divisive manner of managing the addiction crisis.
Booker's response appeared to appease the student, who told him his answer was "great" and thanked the senator, wishing him good luck in what could shape up to be a drawn-out primary race.
Article originally published on POLITICO Magazine