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The U.S. is beginning to turn the tide on the opioid epidemic, HHS Secretary Alex Azar said Tuesday, pointing to new federal data showing a slight dip in overdose deaths last year. Preliminary CDC data released last week shows drug overdose deaths, which spiked in 2017, dropped 2.8 percent toward the end of last year and the beginning of 2018. Azar credited federal, state and local efforts, one day before President Donald Trump will sign overwhelmingly bipartisan legislation to address the opioid crisis. (Ehley, 10/23)

"We are so far from the end of the epidemic, but we are perhaps, at the end of the beginning," Azar said at a health care event sponsored by the Milken Institute think tank. Confronting the opioid epidemic has been the rare issue uniting Republicans and Democrats in a politically divided nation. A bill providing major funding for treatment was passed under former President Barack Obama. More money followed earlier this year under President Donald Trump. And on Wednesday Trump is expected to sign bipartisan legislation passed this month that increases access to treatment, among other steps. (Alonso-Zaldivar and Johnson, 10/23)

The Trump administration is stepping up aid for infants and mothers caught in the opioid epidemic, promising to help states cope with some of the worst collateral damage of the drug crisis, according to prepared remarks scheduled for delivery Tuesday by Health and Human Services Secretary Alex M. Azar. (Bernstein, 10/23)

Trump will sign a sweeping, bipartisan comprehensive opioid bill on Wednesday, which Azar said will provide a wide variety of tools to help combat the epidemic. The bill creates new programs, and expands and reauthorizes existing programs across almost every federal agency, which are aimed at addressing all aspects of the opioid epidemic, like prevention, treatment and recovery. (Weixel, 10/23)

President Donald Trump will tout his response to the opioid crisis when he signs a sweeping bipartisan bill this week, but other drug-related deaths are on the rise and little is being done to address the broader scourge of addiction. Fatalities from misuse of methamphetamine, cocaine and benzodiazapines have surged while Washington’s latest efforts to fight drug addiction funnel new money and resources almost exclusively to localities ravaged by the opioid crisis or pay for treatments and overdose-reversal drugs that don't work for stimulants. (Ehley, 10/23)

The CMS hopes to reduce the number of babies born addicted to opioids by launching a new Medicaid model to treat their mothers. The CMS Innovation Center will enter into agreements with up to 12 states whose Medicaid agencies will implement the "M-O-M or Maternal Opioid Misuse" model with one or more provider organizations in their communities. (Dickson, 10/23)

The family that owns a drug company is now being sued over the toll of opioid painkillers in one New York county — and it’s likely to be sued by hundreds more. Well over 1,000 lawsuits filed by state and local governments blame drug companies for a crisis of addiction and overdoses across the country. Only a few of them have named members of the Sackler family, which owns and controls Purdue Pharma, as defendants. (Mulvihill, 10/23)

Northeast Florida is the hardest-hit part of the state by the opioid epidemic, according to new data presented at a conference in Lake Nona this week. The region is home to some of the highest drug overdose death rates. Epidemiologist Sandeep Kasat says Northeast Florida had a 50 percent increase in its prescription overdose death rate since the beginning of the decade. But he says that number is small compared with the region’s more than 14-hundred percent increase in its illegal overdose death rate. (Prieur, 10/23)

Hennepin Healthcare, one of the state’s largest hospital systems, is among a small but growing number of institutions nationwide that have begun initiating treatment for opioid addiction in the emergency room, where patients often have “hit bottom” and are more receptive to treatment. Clinicians are trying to fill a longstanding gap in the health care system and stem a rising tide of admissions to hospitals by people suffering from opioid addictions. Statewide, hospitalizations for substance abuse have soared 40 percent between 2010 and 2017, reaching nearly 10,000 admissions last year. (Serres, 10/23)