Category: Criminal Law

Brooklyn, New York, United States - JUNE 13 2021: Protest in Brooklyn, NY for trans youth rights.

Misleading, Coercive Language in Bills Barring Trans Youth Access to Gender Affirming Care

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By Arisa R. Marshall

On Friday, a federal judge temporarily enjoined part of a new Alabama law that would make it a felony for physicians to provide gender-affirming care to trans youth. The law had been in effect for less than a week.

This is only the most recent development relating to a raft of anti-trans legislation sweeping the country. More than twenty bills that would impose life-changing healthcare restrictions on transgender children have been introduced in statehouses nationwide over the past two years, threatening the wellbeing of transgender youth and communities. Most of these bills aim to entirely ban gender-affirming medical care for minors, including surgeries, prescription puberty blockers, and hormone replacement therapies.

These laws are detrimental to the mental, physical, and social health of children. They are dismissive of the experiences of transgender children and teenagers, misleading, and manipulative.

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United States Capitol Building - Washington, DC.

Psychedelic Policy on the Federal Level: Key Takeaways from a Petrie-Flom Center Panel

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By James R. Jolin

To navigate the myriad interests and stakes involved in creating federal psychedelic policy, the Petrie-Flom Center for Health Law Policy, Biotechnology, and Bioethics at Harvard Law School convened a virtual panel discussion with three leading psychedelic policy advocates.

The conversation was situated against the backdrop of the “psychedelics renaissance” in the United States, which has been fueled by a wave of local and state legislation reducing or eliminating the criminal penalties associated with these substances.

Though many localities have made significant strides in addressing the legal questions surrounding psychedelic substances such as psilocybin and dimethyltryptamine (DMT), federal policymakers have not pursued similar initiatives.

Suggestions and considerations for federal psychedelic policy thus formed the substance of the discussion among the panelists:

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Businessman's hands typing on laptop keyboard in morning light

Microdosing at Work: Business and Legal Implications

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By Vincent Sliwoski

In light of the widespread cultural and business culture adoption of microdosing, private sector employers should reconsider the implications of a blanket prohibition on workplace use of controlled substances.

Microdosing is the practice of ingesting subperceptual amounts of psychedelic drugs, such as psilocybin mushrooms or LSD. People microdose for a variety of reasons. These may include medical reasons, such as the treatment of anxiety, depression or attention disorders; or they may include “performance” reasons, like attempts to increase productivity, creativity or awareness.

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Red corded telephone handset on blue background, top view. Hotline concept

To Promote Health Equity, States Must Restrict Police Intervention in Mobile Crisis Response

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By April Shaw and Taleed El-Sabawi

The COVID-19 pandemic and recent increases in the incidence of televised violence against Black persons by law enforcement actors and others have contributed to the worsening mental health of these subordinated and marginalized communities. While the policy solutions needed to address this disparate impact are structural and multi-faceted, the introduction of 988, a national mental health crisis hotline, offers an opportunity to positively contribute to the overall goals of decreasing police interactions with Black and Brown communities.

The Federal Communications Commission (FCC) issued a Final Rule designating 988 as a national suicide prevention and mental health crisis hotline in September 2020. Congress later passed the National Suicide Hotline Designation Act of 2020 codifying 988 as the dialing code. Per the FCC Final Rule, states are required to implement 988 into their networks by July 2022.

States have wide latitude in how they implement 988, and though many will likely stop at the bare minimum of creating a suicide prevention hotline, 988 could be coupled with the creation of police alternative (or non-police) mobile responses that assist with de-escalation, stabilization, and connection to treatment. Non-police responses promise to decrease police interaction, excessive use of force, and criminalization of mental illness. Such non-police responses have gained in national popularity due in large part to organization and protests led by Black Lives Matters activists.

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Up close shot of an orange prison jumpsuit

Prison Health Care is Broken Under the Medicaid Inmate Exclusion Policy

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By Sarah Wang

Incarcerated individuals need health care, but punitive policies make securing access to care particularly difficult among this population, which numbers about 2.1 million as of 2021.

As a first step to protecting incarcerated individuals’ right to health, Congress should repeal the Medicaid Inmate Exclusion Policy (MIEP).

The MIEP, established in 1965, prohibits Medicaid from covering incarcerated individuals, despite any prior eligibility. Through the MIEP, two populations are affected: first, jail inmates, defined as those convicted or accused of a crime, and second, prison inmates, defined as those convicted or awaiting trial. In other words, both convicted individuals and those still presumed innocent are stripped of their access to the federal health insurance program for low-income individuals.

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Mushrooms containing psilocybin grow in the forest.

Washington Psilocybin Bill Would Legalize Supported Adult Use

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By Mason Marks

On Tuesday, Washington State legislators filed SB 5660, a bill that would legalize the supported adult use of psilocybin by people 21 years of age and older.

Sponsored by Senators Jesse Salomon and Liz Lovelett, the bill, known as the Washington Psilocybin Wellness and Opportunity Act, includes many innovative features including a Social Opportunity Program to help address harms caused by the war on drugs, a provision to support small businesses, and accommodations for people with certain medical conditions to receive the psychedelic substance at home.

I had the privilege of helping to draft the Washington Psilocybin Services Wellness and Opportunity Act with input from the Psychedelic Medicine Alliance of Washington and my colleague John Rapp of the law firm Harris Bricken. We had previously collaborated on the psychedelic decriminalization resolution adopted unanimously by the Seattle City Council.

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SANTA PAULA, CALIFORNIA - CIRCA 1980's: A small-town barbershop, Santa Paula, CA.

The Road to Systemic Change: Health Justice, Equity, and Anti-Racism

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By Keon L. Gilbert and Jerrell DeCaille

The health justice movement helps to marry social justice models with equity frameworks.

This critical partnership advances health equity through community-based approaches to health care and social services, collaborations that minimize duplicative services, and the creation of sustainable relationships to advocate for systemic change.

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police cars lined up.

Health Justice and the Criminal Legal System: From Reform to Transformation

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By Aysha Pamukcu and Angela P. Harris

Using health justice to reframe and reshape the criminal legal system

The demand to “defund the police,” circulated by the Movement for Black Lives and allies after the brutal 2020 murder of George Floyd, was a departure from the usual discourse of police reform. The demand garnered backlash as being both politically unrealistic and potentially dangerous. But in our view, it demonstrates the transformative potential of social movements focused on justice for marginalized communities. As these justice movements build and strengthen partnerships with public health and civil rights advocates, we see the potential of using the health justice framework to reimagine the future of the criminal legal system.

Calls to deploy the American criminal legal system to enforce national health anxieties are not new, but they too often have produced unjust outcomes, such as adopting criminal punishments for people who are HIV-positive or who are dependent on drugs and pregnant.

In contrast, the health justice framework centers the leadership of social movements for justice and inclusion. Such movements have the capacity to rapidly shift the terms of public debate, making previously unimaginable policy initiatives first discussable, and then doable. And centered in values of anti-subordination, justice movements can challenge biases within elite, highly professionalized disciplines like law and public health.

Policy innovations that emerge from this triple alliance of law, public health, and social movements stand a better chance of improving the lives of marginalized communities than those that treat these communities as targets of discipline or charity. The call to defund the police demonstrates some of these possibilities.

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police cars lined up.

Policing Public Health: Carceral-Logic Lessons from a Mid-Size City

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By Zain Lakhani, Alice Miller, Kayla Thomas, with Anna Wherry

When it comes to public health intervention in a contagion, policing remains a primary enforcement tool. And where a health state is intertwined with carceral logics, enforcement becomes coercive; emphasis is placed on the control of movement and behavior, rather than on support and care.

Our experience in New Haven during the first few months of the COVID-19 pandemic well illuminates this, while also revealing a logic of exceptional force lying dormant in municipal health practices.

Attending to the local is all the more important, albeit difficult, for fast moving and intensely quotidian practices, as COVID in the U.S. seems to be settling in as a pandemic of the local.

Our experience as activist-scholars working with a New Haven-based sex worker-led harm-reduction service and advocacy group, SWAN, suggests that by focusing on municipal practices, we can better understand what public health police power actually is. By orienting our scholarship toward the way social movements engage with local politics, we can then address how these police powers complicate the ability of those most at risk of both disease exposure and police abuse to engage with local authorities. Absent this engagement and critique, progressive policies for constructive state public health powers may be more vulnerable to attack from the right.

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