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The Petrie-Flom Center staff often posts updates, announcements, and guests posts on behalf of others.
Police cars.

Law as a Determinant of Police Violence

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By Osagie K. Obasogie

One idea that distinguishes public health from medicine and other health sciences is the social determinants of health. This concept emphasizes the environmental conditions that give rise to health outcomes — poverty, lack of access to resources, exposures to contaminants, etc. — rather than locating disease solely in biological or physiological processes bounded by human bodies. Following this lead, public health interventions are often focused on community practices that can improve the spaces in which people live. The public health approach is refreshingly simple: healthy communities and environments produce healthy people.

A public health framework for understanding how police and policing impact community health outcomes is necessary as we continue to have wide-ranging conversations about excessive use of force. Improving the health of local communities involves rethinking the laws that govern how police interact with the people they serve.

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Illustration of a family and large clipboard with items in a list checked off. All are underneath a large blue umbrella

Private Law Alternatives to the Individual Mandate: Video Preview with Wendy Netter Epstein

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The Health Law Policy, Bioethics, and Biotechnology Workshop provides a forum for discussion of new scholarship in these fields from the world’s leading experts.

The workshop is led by Professor I. Glenn Cohen, and presenters come from a wide range of disciplines and departments.

In this video, Wendy Netter Epstein gives a preview of her paper, “Private Law Alternatives to the Individual Mandate,” which she will present at the Health Law Policy workshop on November 2, 2020. Watch the full video below:

America divided concept, american flag on cracked background.

Can Psychedelics Help Save America?

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By Shelby Hartman

Amid a fractured political landscape, an unprecedented pandemic, and a reckoning with the country’s racist past, psychedelics may offer some hope for healing in the United States. In recent decades, a renaissance of psychedelic drug research has grown at prominent institutions like Johns Hopkins, New York University, and Imperial College London, among others.

Psilocybin, the psychoactive component in psychedelic mushrooms, and MDMA, sometimes confused with its adulterated version, ecstasy, have both been given breakthrough therapy status by the Food and Drug Administration (FDA), because they’ve shown so much promise for treating conditions for which we currently have few effective options. Psilocybin for treatment-resistant depression and MDMA for post-traumatic disorder are projected to be legal within the next five years as drugs that will be administered under the supervision of trained therapists.

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Police cars.

The False Promise of City-Wide Psilocybin Decriminalization

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By Kathryn Lucido

While city-wide decriminalization of psilocybin is a positive step toward decreasing the impact of the war on drugs, it also creates a false sense of security and progress.

Citing new research that illustrates the therapeutic promise of the drug, several U.S. cities have decriminalized psilocybin, a psychedelic compound that occurs naturally in some fungi. Though these cities have pledged not to spend resources prosecuting people for psilocybin possession, and, in some cases, limited distribution, the substance remains illegal at the federal, state, and city levels.

Psilocybin remains a Schedule I drug under the Controlled Substances Act. This classification means that — at least according to Congress and the Drug Enforcement Administration — psilocybin is a dangerous drug with no currently accepted medical uses and a high risk for abuse.

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Washington, DC – October 16, 2020: One of the many official ballot boxes placed around the city for early voters to place their completed ballots to avoid lines due to the ongoing Covid-19 pandemic.

Psychedelics Helped Me Reclaim My Life and Push to Change Drug Laws

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By Melissa Lavasani

In December 2019, I proposed a ballot measure, now known as Initiative 81, which would effectively decriminalize natural psychedelics – including psilocybin and ayahuasca, which had helped me overcome postpartum depression – in the District of Columbia.

This would help ensure that other D.C. residents benefiting from natural psychedelics are not targeted by law enforcement. After tumultuous months of hard work including collecting more than 25,400 signatures from voters, Initiative 81 is on the November ballot.

I am not the usual protagonist you’d imagine as an advocate for psychedelics: I am a married mother of two with two graduate degrees and an established career working for the District of Columbia government. But I had a psychedelic experience that changed my life. In 2018, I had taken psychedelics – first psilocybin mushrooms, and then ayahuasca and San Pedro cacti – because I was desperate to overcome severe postpartum depression that came to dominate my life.

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Bill of Health - Venezuelan migrant family behind a fence in Colombia, covid-19 migrant crisis

A Critical Analysis of the International Response to COVID-19: Reflections from Colombia

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By Haley Evans, J.D.

In the face of the SARS-CoV-2 pandemic, questions of resource allocation, information access, aseptisation, and biopolitics that were once reserved for the poor and remote are made plausible realities for the Western, postmodern city-dweller. In response, spheres of society have put forth various monodisciplinary “solutions” to stem the spread of COVID-19 and the ensuing economic crisis, though none built through dialogue with another. Influencing many of these responses are the international law frameworks of security and militarization and the Security Council’s contentious construction of crisis. The Silicon Valley tech community endeavors to build a scalable, configurable phone app that can allow for contact tracing on a global scale — overcoming issues of interoperability, data security, and data storage. The Geneva human rights community’s focus is ensuring states’ emergency legislation adhere to principles of legality, necessity and proportionality, and non-discrimination, and that such measures are time-bound. And the populist business community wants quarantine measures to end so that economies can rebuild. Despite this parade of solutions, the coronavirus problem is not being “solved” for everyone.

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Close-up of a stethoscope on an American flag

Why Justice is Good for America’s Health

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By Dayna Bowen Matthew

Justice is good for health [and] . . . health is the byproduct of justice.

— Norman Daniels, Bruce Kennedy & Ichiro Kawachi (Boston Review, 2000)

Among the most salient lessons to be learned from the coronavirus pandemic are that unjust laws produce unjust health outcomes, and that justice is just plain good for America’s health.

Health justice is the moral mandate to protect and advance an equal opportunity for all to enjoy greatest health and well-being possible. Health justice means that no one person or group of people are granted or excluded from the means of pursuing health on an inequitable basis. To achieve health justice, societal institutions such as governments and health care providers must act to advance equality, by increasing fairness and decreasing unfairness of their current and historic impacts on populations.

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U.S. Supreme Court building

The Artifices of Corporate Speech: Video Preview with Nathan Cortez

The Petrie-Flom Center Staff Leave a comment

The Health Law Policy, Bioethics, and Biotechnology Workshop provides a forum for discussion of new scholarship in these fields from the world’s leading experts.

The workshop is led by Professor I. Glenn Cohen, and presenters come from a wide range of disciplines and departments.

In this video, Nathan Cortez gives a preview of his paper, “The Artifices of Corporate Speech,” which he will present at the Health Law Policy workshop on October 26, 2020. Watch the full video below:

people sitting in conference hall.

All-Male Panels, or ‘Manels,’ Must End

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By Kelly Wright and Louise P. King

In this day and age, there is no room for all-male panels, or “manels,” as they are commonly known.

Yet, a quick search of Twitter for #manels or #allmalepanel reveals it remains the norm, with picture after picture of them occurring in a wide array of scientific and medical disciplines. Some try to excuse the error with a woman moderator – a “mom-erator” doing the “housekeeping” of managing the presentations. This is just as bad, if not worse.

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