Last month, President Donald Trump announced his intent to declare a state of emergency in response to the nation's opioid crisis.
Nobody is safe from the opioid epidemic, he said on August 10th.
"It's a national emergency. We're going to spend a lot of time, a lot of effort and a lot of money on the opioid crisis," the president said.
On Monday, a group of ten US senators, most from New England, demanded the president follow through.
In a letter dated September 11, they wrote to the president that his support for policies that would make access to treatment more difficult and his lack of action on the crisis, so far, cause them to question his commitment to ending it.
President Trump's own commission on addiction and opioid use supports declaring the drug epidemic a federal emergency.
US senators from Massachusetts, Rhode Island and New Hampshire signed the letter, as did one each from the states of Connecticut, New Jersey, Ohio and Wisconsin.