ResearchPublications

“The opioid overdose epidemic remains a profound public health crisis in the United States, killing more than 500,000 people between 1999 and 2020 . The dominant narrative explaining policy responses to the epidemic concludes that because opioids are disproportionately a problem of white populations, governments have opted for public health solutions rather than the criminal justice responses to previous drug epidemics, such as crack cocaine in the 1980s. We assert that this understanding is too simplistic. Opioid overdose mortality rates among American Indian and Alaska Native communities have long paralleled those of whites, and Black and Latinx people have seen precipitous increases in opioid overdose death in recent years.”