No Abandonment
For more than two thousand years, physicians have known that opium and its derivatives bind tightly—not only to receptors in the human body, but to lives. The knowledge is ancient; the pattern is predictable.
Podcasts · In this section
Policy and Responsibility
This group examines addiction policy and responsibility, including prevention, criminalization, harm reduction, public health, and the balance between individual and institutional duties.
One Step Forward — Three Steps Back
For three consecutive years, the United States has recorded more than one hundred thousand overdose deaths. That figure is often repeated as a headline number, but it obscures the churn underneath: periods when prevention…
A Responsibility Deferred
America’s overdose crisis now claims over 100,000 lives every year – a staggering human cost that exceeds the toll of car crashes and gun violence. Each death is a son or daughter, a friend…
Make the Map, Do the Work — From Pilot to Policy
Addiction is a human condition expressed through specific lives, neighborhoods, markets, and institutions. Drugs, devices, and behaviors are vehicles; the underlying pattern is the same: relief is discovered, repetition trains attention and routine, alternatives…
Paychecks, Not Punishments — The Shift That Saves Lives
Work sits at the center of stability for individuals and communities. Employment organizes time, supplies income, and provides affiliation.
From Cuffs to Clinic
Justice systems sit at a junction where addiction, public order, and public health meet. The decisions made at first contact, during prosecution, in courtrooms, within custody, and at release can either increase harm or…
Punish or Heal
The war on drugs described a set of policies that treated drug use primarily as a criminal problem to be contained by force. It drew authority from moral panic and from the belief that…