Final Cover — Published February 19, 2026
Inside America’s Opioid Crisis
Drawing on more than three decades of work in national drug policy — including his leadership role at the White House Office of National Drug Control Policy — Richard J. Baum offers an inside account of the decisions, trade-offs, and lessons that have shaped America’s response to the opioid crisis.
Inside America’s Opioid Crisis: 12 Hard Lessons for Today’s Drug War examines how patterns in policymaking, institutional behavior, and public attitudes have shaped both successes and failures in the nation’s struggle with addiction.
Moving beyond diagnosis, the book lays out clear, practical initiatives to strengthen the national response — including 32 concrete recommendations and detailed funding proposals designed to improve outcomes and save lives.
Pre-Order the Book
Inside America’s Opioid Crisis is now available for pre-order on Amazon. Early orders help signal interest to booksellers, reviewers, and conference organizers — and help bring attention to the urgent reforms needed to improve the effectiveness and fairness of U.S. drug policy.
Advance reading copies may be available for journalists, conference organizers, and academic reviewers.
Key Themes in Inside America’s Opioid Crisis
This book reflects on:
• How U.S. drug policy has evolved across multiple presidential administrations.
• The evolving relationship between public health, law enforcement, and non-governmental organizations.
• The institutional and political forces that shape policymaking in a crisis environment.
• The unintended consequences of past policy responses to addiction.
• The barriers to scaling evidence-based reforms — and what it takes to overcome them.
• The human realities — and the cascading impacts — of policy decisions.
Rather than offering a single narrative or ideology, the book examines the tension between competing priorities, the lessons learned from experience, and the opportunities to build a far more effective national response moving forward.
Who This Book is For
Inside America’s Opioid Crisis is written for people who work at the intersection of policy, public health, public safety, and community leadership, including:
• Policymakers and government officials at the federal, state, and local levels.
• Public health, addiction treatment, and recovery professionals.
• Law enforcement and justice system leaders.
• Researchers, journalists, and students of public policy.
• Nonprofit, philanthropic, and community leaders working to reduce fatal overdoses and addiction.
The book is intended to inform serious conversations about how the nation can build a more effective, more humane, and more coordinated response to today’s drug crisis.
About the Book
Inside America’s Opioid Crisis: 12 Hard Lessons for Today’s Drug War offers an insider’s account of how the United States confronted — and too often failed to confront — the most devastating drug epidemic in modern history. Drawing on more than three decades in national drug policy, including service as Acting Director of the White House Office of National Drug Control Policy, Richard J. Baum examines how institutions, politics, science, and public attitudes shaped the nation’s response to addiction, overdose, and illicit drug markets.
Rather than treating the opioid crisis as a single-issue challenge, the book traces how decisions made across multiple administrations — on treatment, prevention, enforcement, public health, and global supply control — interacted in complex and unexpected ways. Baum reflects on successes and missed opportunities, the structural barriers that limited progress, and the lessons policymakers and practitioners must confront if the country is to move beyond crisis-to-crisis management.
Grounded in real-world experience and informed by research, the book looks forward as much as it looks back. It identifies patterns that continue to influence today’s drug policy landscape and outlines practical pathways for building a response that is more effective, more humane, and more capable of meeting the realities of a rapidly evolving drug environment.
What Readers Will Gain
Inside America’s Opioid Crisis is written for readers who want to move beyond slogans, talking points, and fragmented approaches to drug policy. It offers a framework for understanding how decisions made across different systems — health care, law enforcement, courts, treatment programs, international partnerships, and federal budgeting — interact to shape real-world outcomes.
Readers will come away with:
• A clearer understanding of how the modern opioid crisis emerged and evolved across multiple policy eras.
• Insight into how federal decision-making works in practice, including the constraints, tradeoffs, and pressures faced by policymakers.
• Lessons from programs and strategies that showed promise — and an honest accounting of why many failed to scale.
• Perspective on how historical patterns continue to shape today’s policy debates.
• A forward-looking view of what it will take to build a response that is more effective, more compassionate, and more durable over time.
While grounded in personal experience inside government, the book is intended to inform a much broader conversation — helping leaders, practitioners, students, and citizens think more clearly about how the nation can respond to addiction and drug-related harm with greater impact and purpose.