MICHELE STEEB: Addiction Is A Disease — Policy May Finally Catch Up

(Photo by John Moore/Getty Images)

More than 48 million Americans are battling substance use disorder.

Many are deteriorating in plain sight — on sidewalks, in encampments, and in emergency rooms. Others decline behind closed doors.

Overdoses are shattering families, especially within the homelessness population where the death rate among people living on the streets has surged by 77 percent.

Yet in a media landscape quick to amplify controversy but slow to recognize consequential reform, President Donald Trump’s executive order to overhaul America’s addiction response passed with remarkably little national attention.

At its core, the order affirms a truth long understood by those who have worked on the front lines: no man or woman living with addiction ever dreamed of this life. (RELATED: Mamdani Finds Way To Downplay Homeless Deaths After Deadly Blizzard)

When these individuals were six years old — sitting cross-legged on a classroom rug, answering their first-grade teacher’s question about what they wanted to be when they grew up — no child said they hoped to grow up addicted, psychotic, isolated, or dying on a sidewalk. No one aspired to be forgotten.

They may have fallen. But a fall is an event, not an identity. Any serious national response must begin with that distinction, as this President does.

Co-chaired........

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