Critical Releases in Homeland Security: December 6, 2017

"The National Preparedness Report is an annual requirement of The Post-Katrina Emergency Management Reform Act of 2006 and a key element of the National Preparedness System. The report evaluates and measures gains that individuals and communities, private and nonprofit sectors, faith-based organizations, and all levels of government have made in preparedness. It also identifies where challenges and opportunities for improvement remain. The 2017 National Preparedness Report focuses primarily on preparedness activities undertaken or reported during calendar year 2016 and summarizes progress in building, sustaining, and delivering the 32 core capabilities outlined in the National Preparedness Goal."

"The opioid drug problem has reached crisis levels in the United States--in 2015, over 33,000 Americans died of a drug overdose involving opioids. CEA [Council of Economic Advisers] finds that previous estimates of the economic cost of the opioid crisis greatly understate it by undervaluing the most important component of the loss--fatalities resulting from overdoses. This paper estimates the economic cost of these deaths using conventional economic estimates for valuing life routinely used by U.S. Federal agencies. It also adjusts for underreporting of opioids in overdose deaths, includes heroin-related fatalities, and incorporates nonfatal costs of opioid misuse. CEA estimates that in 2015, the economic cost of the opioid crisis was $504.0 billion, or 2.8 percent of GDP that year. This is over six times larger than the most recently estimated economic cost of the epidemic."