Scott Gottlieb took the opioid epidemic seriously, winning over the Trump administration’s critics and skeptics.
Food and Drug Administration head Scott Gottlieb resigned on Tuesday — leaving a hole not just in the country’s top agency for food and drug regulation, but also in the Trump administration’s response to the opioid epidemic.
President Donald Trump has generally underwhelmed advocates and experts when it comes to his response to the opioid epidemic. He’s failed to allocate the levels of funding necessary to really build up addiction treatment, and focused on efforts, like the border wall and Obamacare repeal, that would do little to resolve the crisis and may actually make it worse.
Gottlieb has been an exception in the Trump administration. He has been very focused on the opioid epidemic, calling it the “biggest crisis facing the FDA.” When I asked last spring about Gottlieb’s performance, Stanford drug policy expert Keith Humphreys — not a fan of the Trump administration in general — told me that “Gottlieb has been shockingly good so far. I hope he doesn’t get fired.”
Gottlieb has also earned praise for his work in other areas, particularly on tobacco, nutrition regulations, and drug prices (though he angered some for his criticisms of e-cigarettes). As Julia Belluz, Dylan Scott, and I wrote last year, he was a rare Trump official who was winning over skeptics.
On opioids, Gottlieb promised changes. But he also owned up to the FDA’s past inaction and failures, acknowledging that the agency allowed opioid painkillers to proliferate and fuel an epidemic of addiction and overdose.
