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 "We're going to look into the report," Trump told reporters at the
White House.
Asked if the report had undercut his confidence in his nominee to
head the Office of National Drug Control Policy, Representative Tom
Marino, Trump said: "I have not spoken to him, but I will speak to
him, and I'll make that determination.
"If I think it's 1 percent negative to doing what we want to do, I
will make a change, yes," he added.
Marino's office did not immediately return a request for comment.
The report by the Washington Post and CBS described how Marino
introduced and helped push through industry-backed legislation that
undercut the Drug Enforcement Administration's ability to freeze
suspicious shipments of pain pills from drug companies.
A number of Democrats called for Trump to abandon his nominee in the
wake of the report.
"Congressman Marino no longer has my trust or that of the public
that he will aggressively pursue the fight against opioid abuse,"
Democratic Senator Joe Manchin said in a statement. Manchin's state
of West Virginia has been hit hard by the opioid crisis.
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In his remarks to reporters, Trump suggested he would be open to
changing the law that Marino, a fellow Republican, helped push
through and said he would make good on an earlier promise to declare
the opioid epidemic a national emergency.
"We are going to be doing that next week," he said, calling the
crisis a "massive problem."
Opioids were involved in more than 33,000 deaths in the United
States in 2015, the last year of publicly available data, according
to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Overdoses from
the category of drugs nearly quadrupled between 1999 and 2015, the
CDC said.
(Reporting by James Oliphant; Writing by Makini Brice and Tim Ahmann;
Editing by Lisa Shumaker and Leslie Adler)
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