Obama’s national drug strategy fails while death toll soars by 40%

US President Barack Obama during an official meeting with the President of Ukraine Petro Poroshenko in Washington, DC (Mykhaylo Palinchak / Shutterstock)

WASHINGTON, July 27 — A report by GAO reveals that none of the overall goals in the US National Drug Control Strategy of Barack Obama has been fully achieved.

None of the overall goals in the US National Drug Control Strategy of President Barack Obama has been fully achieved and drug-induced deaths instead increased from 2009 to 2015 by more than 40 percent, the Government Accountability Office (GAO) said in a report.

“The federal government has made mixed progress toward achieving the goals articulated in the 2010 National Drug Control Strategy,” the report stated on Wednesday. “[N]one of the overall goals in the Strategy were fully achieved.”

Progress had not been made on the goal to reduce drug-induced deaths by 15 percent and drug-induced deaths instead increased from 2009 to 2015 by 41.5 percent and as of July 2017, work is currently underway to develop a new strategy, the report revealed.

“According to ONDCP [Office of National Drug Control Policy] as of July 2017, work is currently underway to develop a new strategy,” the report said.

According to the National Institute on Drug Abuse, in 2015, the most recent year for which national data are available, over 52,000, the GAO said.