By Scott Burris
Last week, the American Journal of Public Health published a PHLR paper by Michelle Mello and colleagues calling for our field to identfy “critical opportunities” for public health law. Critical Opportunities are legal interventions that target important public health problems. They may have a strong evidence base but be underutilized (like alcohol taxes that keep up with inflation). They may be ideas that appear to be working in practice, and have a plausible mechanism of effect, even if our evidence base still consists of early studies or reports from practice (like distributing naloxone to opioid users and their friends to reduce overdose death). And they may be innovations that are plausible because of how they appear to relate to the problem or because they are similar in mechanism to other legal interventions that have been proven to work (like restricting sales of single cigars). The bottom line is that we can do a better job spreading the word about legal interventions that work and that policy makers and the public can get behind in states and localities around the country.
The Robert Wood Johnson Foundation has helped get the idea moving by supporting a series of videos in which public health lawyers, practitioners and researchers pitch their ideas for critical opportunities. These are often done, like a Ted Talk, at meetings, and one of the audience favorites is Dana Singer’s pitch for action to deal with “Mountain Dew Mouth,” a term gaining in traction to name the devastating consequences of heavy consumption of sugary beverages, especially those with critic acid. The issue is on the federal agenda as part of the debate about food stamps. It’s a hard one: public health people see the terrible consequences of these products and think that ending the federal “subsidy” for them might reduce harm; SNAP advocates don’t like the idea of anyone telling poor people what to eat and drink; industry, well, you can guess. State and local beverage taxes are another option, and we know that taxes can reduce consumption of even addictive products.
NPR has a story on the problem and some of the solutions this week. I’m glad to see more attention to this problem, because poor dental health can send anyone’s life on a harder course, and is a very big problem in Appalachia. If you don’t believe me, or even NPR, read Priscilla Harris’s paper and watch Dana’s critical ops video.
