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A new textbook by Assistant Professor Sean Haley and colleagues provides a concise overview of the opioid crisis, explores the public health response to the epidemic, and considers how a population health approach that attends to political, racial, and economic factors may help to create stronger policy responses to the epidemic.
Opioids and Population Health: A Primer begins by describing opioids’ physiological mechanisms, including the combination of pain relief and euphoria that can create opportunities for the development of opioid use disorders. The description of how opioids function is used to explain how opioids have made such an indelible contribution to population level harms while serving an important role in medically supervised pain management.
Chapters address the early use of opioids in the United States, opioid trade, the use of opioids in early medications, pharmaceutical production, opioid availability, the prevalence of opioid use and disorders, mortality, treatment approaches, as well as public health policies and the public health infrastructure that has been used to address the epidemic.
“Although the primer is limited in scope, we attempted to highlight how both race and class have been leveraged for political expediency and to maximize opioid sales,” Haley says. “The use of historical references helps to explain how some of the systems that should have protected the public’s health and safety faltered.”
Preorder your copy of Opioids and Population Health: A Primer from Jones and Bartlett Learning here.
