“The GOP has a talent for ignoring the despair of the dis-empowered. But the opioid epidemic concentrated its suffering in white, rural communities that tend to vote Republican. And so, GOP candidates spent much of 2016 decrying Washington’s insufficient efforts to curb the crisis, and promising to do more to help, if voters would only put them in power… The pitch worked. Donald Trump won the presidency (in no small part) by outperforming expectations in regions devastated by opiods. Republicans won competitive Senate races in some of the country’s hardest-hit states. And all across America, rural districts hurt by the epidemic returned GOP incumbents to their House seats. The Republican Party then promptly used its unified control of government to push a health-care bill that cuts one of the nation’s top funding sources for addiction treatment by $834 billion.” More …