WASHINGTON — President Obama on Tuesday will travel to Atlanta to speak at a meeting of recovering drug addicts, doctors and law enforcement officials, reinforcing his response to the nation’s spiraling prescription painkiller and heroin epidemic.

Mr. Obama will announce several mostly modest measures to expand drug treatment centers and to increase the use of naloxone and similar drugs that reverse the effects of overdoses from opioids, which include illegal narcotics like heroin to brand-name painkillers like OxyContin and Percocet.

The last time Mr. Obama traveled outside of Washington to draw attention to the scourge of opioid addiction — to West Virginia in October — his administration was widely criticized for not doing enough to combat a public health epidemic that has worsened greatly during his presidency.

Since that trip, however, the federal government has published the first national guidelines for prescription painkillers, required new warning labels for certain kinds of opioid painkillers and requested an additional $1.1 billion to expand treatment facilities and to finance programs to prevent overdoses and to constrain illegal sales of drugs.

 

Graphic | How the Epidemic of Drug Overdose Deaths Ripples Across America Drug deaths have surged in nearly every U.S. county, reaching a new peak in 2014.

 “The only thing I would fault them for is that they waited too long to do this,” said Dr. Carl R. Sullivan, the director of addiction services at the West Virginia University School of Medicine. “This has been able to idle along for a long time. People have been almost embarrassed to talk about it.”

In particular, Dr. Sullivan said, the national guidelines issued by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention provided a “compass point” for the treatment of patients and the education of medical residents and even practicing doctors. “The situation is so dire that we had to do something,” he said.

Opioids played a part in 28,648 deaths in the United States in 2014, a record number, according to the C.D.C. Opioid painkillers like OxyContin, Percocet and Vicodin are among the most widely prescribed drugs in the country, generating nearly $2 billion a year in sales.

Part of the issue for the Obama administration in combating those drugs is that the job of regulating them has historically fallen to the states. Massachusetts, Vermont and Maine are among states that have moved in recent months to limit the ability of doctors to prescribe these pills. But patient and doctor groups, some funded by the pharmaceutical industry, have fiercely resisted both the state and federal efforts.

In highlighting the dangers of drug addiction, Mr. Obama has spoken in starkly personal terms, referring to it at times almost like a road not traveled. “I did stuff, and I’ve been very honest about it,” the president said before an audience of recovering addicts in Charleston, W.Va., in October. “So when I think about it, there but for the grace of God.”