The Food and Drug Administration has mishandled the opioid crisis for many years, but new FDA boss Dr. Scott Gottlieb tells NBC's "Today" show he's already taken steps to beef up controls over the pain-killer drugs that kill some 60,000 Americans a year.
"I think a lot of people didn't do what they needed to do in the past," Gottlieb told NBC's Cynthia McFadden. He told McFadden his agency has already put tighter restrictions on opioids in cough medicine for children, ordered 74 major drug manufacturers to give their employees better training and is urging drug companies to package opiods in smaller quantities.
The FDA has come under increasing criticism over how it handled the drug crisis, which has worsened since the FDA approved the drug for chronic pain in 1995. President Donald Trump declared the opioid crisis a public health emergency last October. "We are going to overcome addiction in America," Trump declared at the time.
Gottlieb said his team is trying to learn from the mistakes of earlier administrations.
"I look to the past to try to understand what we did wrong to try to inform what we can do right going forward."
Still, Gottlieb warned that reversing the trend of opioid deaths will take time.
"I don't think that this is going to be a five-year effort," he told McFadden. "But it will take a year or two to get the optimal place here … I don't want to be looking back five years from now and saying I wish I had done more."