In our first bonus episode, host Hannah Miller and co-host Douglas Berman look back at Season 1 Episode 1. The episode provides updates and insights into the continued struggle to change the crack to powder cocaine ratio from 18:1 to 1:1 and further reduce unwarranted sentencing disparities.
Opioids
Drug Enforcement and Policy Center launches Drugs on the Docket podcast
Drugs on the Docket is a production of the Drug Enforcement and Policy Center (DEPC) at The Ohio State University. Each episode explores how U.S. court rulings—primarily those handed down from the Supreme Court—impact drug law and policy and continue to shape the War on Drugs. Drugs on the Docket unpacks various ways courts have engaged with and responded to the opioid epidemic, police discretion, the sentencing disparities between crack and powder cocaine, and more. The series, hosted by Hannah Miller, invites guests with expertise in criminal justice, drug policy, and drug enforcement to help us break down the sometimes complex and always interesting stories behind today’s drug law landscape.
All six episodes are available now on Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts and YouTube.
Safety First
Safety First: Real Drug Education for Teens by the Drug Policy Alliance is the nation’s first harm reduction-based drug education curriculum for young people in the United States. The free curriculum consists of 15 lessons that can be completed in a 45- to 50-minute class period.
Policy Fact Sheets and Briefs
The Drug Policy Alliance created a collection of policy fact sheets and briefs on emerging drug policy issues. This site contains fact sheets about issues like drug testing, the impact of the overdose crisis on Latinx people, contingency management, and the connection between the drug war and police militarization.
Drug fact sheets
Drug fact sheets produced by the Drug Policy Alliance about the science, use, and effects of ten different classes of drugs.
Modeling Health Benefits and Harms of Public Policy Responses to the US Opioid Epidemic
This piece, aimed at estimating health outcomes of policies to mitigate the opioid epidemic, concludes based on its findings that “policies focused on services for addicted people improve population health without harming any groups.”
Sourced from Abstract in link.
Opioid Crisis: No Easy Fix to its Social and Economic Determinants
“Overreliance on opioid medications is emblematic of a health care system that incentivizes quick, simplistic answers to complex physical and mental health needs. In an analogous way, simplistic measures to cut access to opioids offer illusory solutions to this multidimensional societal challenge.”
Sourced from Abstract in Link.
Today’s nonmedical opioid users are not yesterday’s patients; implications of data indicating stable rates of nonmedical use and pain reliever use disorder
“Health care in general, and pain and addiction management in particular, are nuanced undertakings. Current public policies aimed at reducing opioid-related deaths ignore such nuance in favor of ham-handed, empirically dubious, and demonstrably harmful dictates. Americans suffering from chronic pain, and those from whom they receive their treatment, deserve medical care managed through better-informed and more even-handed policy.”
Sourced from Abstract in link.
Whitewashed: The African American Opioid Epidemic
This piece aims to expose the ways in which we have focused our attention in regards to the opioid epidemic almost exclusively on white communities, leaving many African American communities who suffer in similar ways without the same care, attention, or exposure. Treatment and response plans should include African Americans as apart of the conversation, and this paper aims to support that claim with data and studies.
Toward Healthy Drug Policy in the United States – The Case of Safehouse
This work focuses on critiquing the past views on drug policy and calls on the Controlled Substance Act’s failure to control the supply of drugs and thereby reduce drug-related harms.
Sourced from the New England Journal of Medicine.