The Petrie-Flom Center is excited to announce our affiliated researchers for the Project on Psychedelics Law and Regulation (POPLAR) and our new project, Psychedelic Use, Law, and Spiritual Experience (PULSE). Through research, writing, workshops, and other projects, POPLAR and PULSE affiliated researchers will provide expertise and a range of perspectives on psychedelics law and policy. We look forward to learning from them and sharing their insights with our audiences.
Tag: health law policy
From Stigma to Diagnosis: How Medicalizing Obesity Empowers Individuals to Take Charge of their Lives
It’s been all the rage — celebrities and physicians tout GLP-1 inhibitors, like Ozempic and Wegovy, as miracle drugs for diabetes management and weight loss. But some still believe weight loss is a function of personal control and view these drugs as taking the “easy way out.”
While the rise of weight loss drugs is controversial, medicalizing obesity shouldn’t be. Many who struggle with chronic weight-related conditions finally see a light at the end of the tunnel. Viewing obesity as a medical problem that can be treated with medication and as a chronic condition with complex causes more accurately reflects new research, destigmatizes seeking treatment, incentivizes the development of new treatment tools, and increases overall well-being.
Going to New Orleans? You may need to leave your ulcer medication behind
by Leslie P. Francis
That’s correct: unless your prescription for misoprostol meets strict new conditions, possession of the drug is now illegal in Louisiana. In late May 2024, Louisiana governor Jeff Landry signed a bill making misoprostol and mifepristone schedule IV drugs, the most highly regulated controlled substances. Violating the law may result in jail sentences or fines.
Artificial Intelligence Plus Data Democratization Requires New Health Care Framework
By Michael L. Millenson
The latest draft government strategic plan for health information technology pledges to support health information sharing among individuals, health care providers and others “so that they can make informed decisions and create better health outcomes.”
Those good intentions notwithstanding, the current health data landscape is dramatically different from when the organizational author of the plan, the Office of the National Coordinator for Health IT, formed two decades ago. As Price and Cohen have pointed out, entities subject to federal Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA) requirements represent just the tip of the informational iceberg. Looming larger are health information generated by non-HIPAA-covered entities, user-generated health information, and non-health information being used to generate inferences about treatment and health improvement.
Eight Opportunities to Use the Law to Address Social Determinants of Health
By Jon Larsen and Sterling Johnson
Addressing the opioid crisis cannot stop at providing better access to treatment for opioid use disorder (OUD), expanding and enhancing harm reduction efforts, and reimagining the role of law enforcement, as explored previously in this blog series. The response must go further to make treatment and harm reduction more effective, by acknowledging the opioid epidemic as a reflection of the conditions of the whole society, identifying those conditions, and addressing them head-on. A whole-person response to OUD and other substance use disorders needs a well-coordinated whole-of-government response to address myriad societal issues that are critical to effective drug treatment, including, but not limited to, housing, education, economic development, and tax policy.
Conclusion to the Symposium: From Principles to Practice: Human Rights and Public Health Emergencies
By Timothy Fish Hodgson, Roojin Habibi, and Alicia Ely Yamin
In developing the digital symposium, From Principles to Practice: Human Rights and Public Health Emergencies (which ran from October – December 2023), as editors we endeavored to get scholars, human rights advocates, judges, and policy makers to engage critically with the expert Principles and Guidelines on Human Rights and Public Health Emergencies (the PHE Principles), published by the International Commission of Jurists and the Global Health Law Consortium in May 2023. In doing so, we encouraged contributors to comment on the Principles’ potential usefulness as guidance in addressing real emergency situations, as well as any possible gaps and weaknesses.
While summarizing the entire content of the 13 blogs comprising this symposium in any depth is not possible here, this concluding post will attempt to synthesize some of the major inputs from the contributions. We also provide some of our own observations, as participants in the drafting of the Principles, with the aim of pushing the discussion prompted by the posts forward.
Six Opportunities to Use the Law to Support Harm Reduction
By Jon Larsen and Sterling Johnson
Harm reduction in the context of the opioid crisis is focused on preventing overdose and infectious disease transmission by working with people who use drugs without moral judgment. Far too often, the public health imperative of harm reduction is blocked by federal policy, state laws, and other structural barriers anchored in the “war on drugs” that reduce the effectiveness of harm reduction efforts. To maximize the potential of harm reduction requires a whole-of-government approach, involving coordination across levels of government.
As noted in this recent report, “Bringing the W-G approach to bear on a complex problem depends on several components, including agreement as to the problem, understanding the problem, and the causes of the problem. For many involved in government at all levels, the harm reduction challenge unfortunately falls at the first of those hurdles.”
Introducing the Global Health and Rights Project’s New Affiliated Researchers
(Clockwise from top left: Daniela Cepeda Cuadrado, Lucía Berro Pizzarossa, Natalia Pires de Vasconcelos, Thalia Viveros Uehara)
The Petrie-Flom Center is excited to welcome four new affiliated researchers to the Global Health and Rights Project (GHRP).
Through regular contributions to Bill of Health, as well as workshops and other projects, GHRP affiliated researchers will bring their expertise to bear on both national and global problems, advancing critical socio-legal scholarship both within and beyond Latin America. We look forward to learning from and sharing their insights with a wider audience, and to contributing to enlarging international networks of critical praxis in global health and human rights.
Seven Opportunities to Use the Law to Address Drug Policing
By Jon Larsen and Sterling Johnson
There is a well-established whole of government response to drug policing centered around the “war on drugs.” However, the existing response is largely built on flawed policies that have resulted in mass incarceration, structural racism, and lagging improvements in treatment and harm reduction related to the opioid crisis. Policy changes must be considered to replace acknowledged failures and reimagine the whole of government response to drug policing.
With support from the Foundation for Opioid Response Efforts (FORE), public health law experts from Indiana University McKinney School of Law and the Temple University Center for Public Health Law Research at the Beasley School of Law recently embarked on a systematic review of US drug policy using a whole-of-government (W-G) approach to assess where these misalignments are occurring among different agencies at the same level of government (referred to as horizontal W-G), and across different levels of government (referred to as vertical W-G). It ultimately provides a tool to address these misalignments directly.
The Case for Procurement Transparency
By Tara Davis and Nicola Soekoe
In January 2021, the Director General of the World Health Organization (WHO) observed that the world was on the brink of a “catastrophic moral failure” if wealthier nations did not ensure the equitable distribution of COVID-19 vaccines. Global health activists and civil society organizations who worked transnationally to curtail what came to be referred to as “vaccine apartheid” faced a pharmaceutical industry that globally relied on secrecy, capital-friendly trade laws, and brute economic force to shirk considerations of human rights. In many ways, pharmaceutical companies and the states that protected them, including by failing to achieve consensus at the World Trade Organization (WTO) for a waiver of intellectual property rights with respect to vaccines, seemed impenetrable.
Unsurprisingly, given the extreme position of power from which pharmaceutical companies were negotiating contracts, there were widespread reports and allegations of inequitable contractual terms and a culture of bullying in the development of contracts. This was an issue of global concern for a long period during the pandemic. In South Africa, the Health Justice Initiative (HJI), a local advocacy organization, joined the global calls for greater procurement transparency.
However, when the South African Department of Health refused to disclose even the names of the entities with which it had entered into vaccine-related agreements, the HJI was forced to turn to the courts for relief.