GLENN: 21 people will be dead before this show is over.

Why?

In America, seven lives are lost every hour to drug overdoses.

It’s not hyperbole to say that the current opioid epidemic is the deadliest drug crisis in American history. It’s so bad that President Trump declared the crisis a national health emergency yesterday.

I am impressed with Trump and Melania’s dedication to this issue. It is an honorable cause that desperately needs to be addressed. The opioid addiction is suffocating this country. That stats are truly horrifying.

Overdoses killed more people last year than guns or car accidents, and are doing so at a pace faster than the H.I.V. epidemic at its peak.

In 2015, 2 percent of deaths, one in 50, in the United States were drug-related. Opioid addiction is so bad that it contributed to the US life expectancy dropping for the first time in decades. Trump’s plan to fight this epidemic is clunky, yet noble. Of course, he is going to produce “really tough, really big, really great advertising” to discourage people from getting hooked in the first place a la Nancy Reagan.

But he also said his plan would include a requirement that federally employed prescribers be trained in safe practices for opioid prescriptions, a new federal initiative to develop nonaddictive painkillers, and suspending a rule that currently prevents Medicaid from funding many drug rehabilitation facilities.

It’s a step in the right direction. But the government alone cannot end the opioid epidemic.

Only individuals have the true power to end their addiction.

Ultimately, it falls on us to dig ourselves and our loved ones out of this opioid mire.