Navigating the Opioid Crisis:
Medicine, Monitoring, and Ethics

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Join us for a compelling event with Elizabeth Chiarello, author of Policing Patients. Drawing on extensive research, Chiarello explores how opioid surveillance tools are reshaping healthcare, forcing doctors and pharmacists to balance treatment with law enforcement. She’ll discuss the impact of these programs on patient care and the broader implications for public health. Don’t miss this important conversation on the challenges facing medical providers in today’s opioid crisis.

A book that takes you inside the culture of surveillance that pits healthcare providers against their patients

Doctors and pharmacists make critical decisions every day about whether to dispense opioids that alleviate pain but fuel addiction. Faced with a drug crisis that has already claimed more than a million lives, legislatures, courts, and policymakers have enlisted the help of technology in the hopes of curtailing prescriptions and preventing deaths. This book reveals how this “Trojan horse” technology embeds the logics of surveillance in the practice of medicine, forcing care providers to police their patients while undermining public trust and doing untold damage to those at risk.

Elizabeth Chiarello draws on hundreds of in-depth interviews with physicians, pharmacists, and enforcement agents across the United States to take readers to the frontlines of the opioid crisis, where medical providers must make difficult choices between treating and punishing the people in their care. States now employ prescription drug monitoring programs capable of tracking all controlled substances within a state and across state lines. Chiarello describes how the reliance on these databases blurs the line between medicine and criminal justice and pits pain sufferers against people with substance-use disorders in a zero-sum game.

Shedding critical light on this brave new world of healthcare, Policing Patients urges medical providers to reaffirm their roles as healers and proposes invaluable policy solutions centered on treatment, prevention, and harm reduction.

Elizabeth Chiarello is associate professor of sociology at Saint Louis University, a former fellow at the Harvard Radcliffe Institute, and a frequent public commentator on opioid-related topics. She and her work have been featured in USA Today and on Bloomberg News, among other leading media outlets. Her work is supported by the National Science Foundation.

Anne Higonnet is a local long-time RJ Julia Booksellers customer and in the writing group that supported Policing Patients. She is the Barbara Novak Professor of Art History at Barnard College, Columbia University. She has published, most recently, the widely reviewed Liberty, Equality, Fashion: the Women Who Styled the French Revolution, as well as pieces in Vogue and Town & Country. She has also written five other books as well as many essays, and directed two book-scale digital projects.

Her research has been supported by Getty, Guggenheim, Social Science Research Council, and Harvard-Radcliffe Institute fellowships, as well as by grants from the Mellon, Howard and Kress Foundations. She a prize-winning teacher of popular lecture courses. During spring 2024, one of her courses was offered in hybrid form through Educational Equity Laboratory to five underserved New York City high schools. She received her BA from Harvard College in 1980 and her PhD from Yale University in 1988.

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Can’t make it to the event? Purchase a signed and personalized copy of Policing Patients.

Event Date:

Tuesday, November 12, 2024 - 6:00pm EST

Event address:

RJ Julia Booksellers

768 Boston Post Road

Madison, CT 06443