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America’S Favorite Antidote: Drug-Induced Homicide In The Age Of The Overdose Crisis, Leo Beletsky
America’S Favorite Antidote: Drug-Induced Homicide In The Age Of The Overdose Crisis, Leo Beletsky
Utah Law Review
Nearing the end of its second decade, the overdose crisis in the United States continues to claim tens of thousands of lives. Despite the rhetorical emphasis on a “public health” approach, criminal law and its enforcement continue to play a central role among policy responses to this crisis. A legacy of the 1980s War on Drugs, statutory provisions that implicate drug distributors in overdose fatalities are on the books in many U.S. jurisdictions and federally. This Article articulates an interdisciplinary critique of these “drug-induced homicide” laws at a time of their increased popularity, expanding scope, and aggressive prosecution. That these …
Seeking Insurance Parity During The Opioid Epidemic, Valarie K. Blake
Seeking Insurance Parity During The Opioid Epidemic, Valarie K. Blake
Utah Law Review
Private insurance covers almost 40 percent of people with opioid addiction. Yet, amid an epidemic with profound consequences for individual and public health, private insurers continue to fuel addiction by favoring addictive but affordable pain therapies over nonaddictive ones and by placing unreasonable, sometimes unlawful, hurdles and delays in the ways of addiction treatment. Action must be taken now to address these harms. Laws like the ACA and the MHPAEA need greater enforcement, while gaps in these laws can and should be addressed through broader federal and state initiatives. Private insurers must be regulated, and swiftly, to ensure that people …
Illegal Substance Abuse And Protection From Discrimination In Housing And Employment: Reversing The Exclusion Of Illegal Substance Abuse As A Disability, Leslie P. Francis
Illegal Substance Abuse And Protection From Discrimination In Housing And Employment: Reversing The Exclusion Of Illegal Substance Abuse As A Disability, Leslie P. Francis
Utah Law Review
When landlords or employers know that someone is using opioids, either legally or illegally, the consequences can be significant. Rental housing or employment are both critical to well-being, yet may be at particularly high risk. As this Article argues below, legal protections in these areas are inadequate. To summarize the argument briefly, a crucial legal problem for people suffering from substance abuse disorders is that current illegal use of controlled substances is excluded from the definition of disability in federal anti-discrimination statutes. A history of substance abuse is a disability protected from discrimination, but recent relapses vitiate this protection. Relatedly, …
Federal Regulatory Responses To The Prescription Opioid Crisis: Too Little, Too Late?, Lars Noah
Federal Regulatory Responses To The Prescription Opioid Crisis: Too Little, Too Late?, Lars Noah
Utah Law Review
Part I of this Article suggests that the medical establishment shares more blame for the crisis than many commentators seem to appreciate. Part II canvasses a variety of ways in which the federal government has responded to the opioid problem during the last few years before delving more deeply into the FDA’s role in the mess, assessing the different tools that it has tried to use as well as some that it failed to employ. This Article concludes that the agency should have allowed only a narrowly defined subset of physicians to prescribe opioid analgesics, even though the medical community …
From Health Policy To Stigma And Back Again: The Feedback Loop Perpetuating The Opioids Crisis, Nicolas Terry
From Health Policy To Stigma And Back Again: The Feedback Loop Perpetuating The Opioids Crisis, Nicolas Terry
Utah Law Review
Between 1999 and 2017, almost 400,000 people died from opioid overdoses, and since 2001, the opioid crisis has cost the U.S. more than 1 trillion dollars. In late 2018, the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) Secretary opined that the country was “beginning to turn the tide” in responding to the crisis. Secretary Azar’s positive statements were based on preliminary CDC data that showed a national decline of 2.7 percent in drug overdose deaths from October 2017 to May 2018. However, data still show over half the states posting an increase in overdose deaths with a concentration of higher …