After successfully steering Justice Neil Gorsuch into a spot on the U.S. Supreme Court, Kelly Ayotte made an appearance at Harvard University’s T.H. Chan School of Public Health on Thursday to discuss the opioid crisis.
Sitting in front of dozens of students and faculty, Ayotte was interviewed about her past work as a senator and New Hampshire Attorney General fighting the state’s addiction epidemic, and she said Congress needs to keep working together to solve the addiction crisis.
“I think people sometimes think this is a law enforcement issue,” Ayotte said. “This is really a public health crisis.”
Ayotte is no stranger to Harvard; she was recently named one of three distinguished fellows at the Harvard Kennedy School’s Institute of Politics this spring after losing a close re-election bid to Democrat Maggie Hassan in 2016.
The former senator just wrapped up her tenure as a counselor to Supreme Court Justice Neil Gorsuch as he faced a tough confirmation vote in the Senate last week. Ayotte guided the Colorado judge through the confirmation process on Capitol Hill.
But the conversation at the T.H. Chan School on Thursday shied away from any talk of Gorsuch and focused much more on the country’s opioid crisis.
Ayotte highlighted her support of the Comprehensive Addiction and Recovery Act and the 21st Century Cures Act and said Congress needs to do even more to help states like New Hampshire expand their treatment capacity. However, state and local players have an important role as well, she added.
“The federal government can’t do the day-to-day work that needs to be done at the state and local level,” Ayotte said. “It’s your local community where you’re going to go seek treatment.”
Ayotte also spoke in favor of individual states and medical schools’ taking a hard look at doctors’ prescribing practices for pain medication, and she said insurance companies should cover alternative pain therapies to cut back on the use of opioids.
When asked why New Hampshire ranks so high nationwide in terms of drug overdose deaths, Ayotte said she believed it was a number of factors, including a lack of treatment capacity combined with lethal drugs like fentanyl flowing in over the state’s borders.
“It took a while for this to snowball, to all come together for a crisis,” she said. “It’s going to take some time, not just for the state of New Hampshire, but also the country to come together and work through this.”
(Ella Nilsen can be reached at 369-3322, enilsen@cmonitor.com or on Twitter @ella_nilsen.)