Mötley Crüe’s Nikki Sixx is stepping up to give the opioid crisis what it so desperately needs—more celebrity spokespeople willing to use star power to draw attention to the cause.
In an Op-Ed for the Los Angeles Times, Sixx wrote that the opioid epidemic that is plaguing the nation can be stopped. “It’s solvable,” he wrote. He called on President Trump to follow through on his White House’s interim report to focus on “treatment, education about pain management for doctors, research and data collection, and rational “supply reduction.” He asked Congress to approve a 2018 budget that includes funding for Medicaid, because approximately 30% of opioid addicts receive treatment through Medicaid. He also demanded that drug manufacturers be held accountable for their role in the crisis, and urged that Naloxone, a medication that can block the effects of opioids and reverse an overdose in progress, be made widely available.
While Sixx admits in the Op-Ed that he is not exactly a policy expert, he knows a thing or two about heroin. “Heroin nearly killed me,” he writes. “As a matter of fact, it did: For two minutes in 1987 I was pronounced clinically dead from an overdose.”
Sixx calls himself “one of the lucky ones,” but doesn’t want to stand quietly by while addiction kills people and ravages the nation. “So I am speaking out,” he writes. He isn’t alone, though: Last year, rapper Macklemore appeared in a documentary about the crisis with President Obama. Hopefully, more brave celebrities—or anyone who lived through the ’90s heroin craze—will speak out, too, and help raise awareness.
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