Tracing the US opioid crisis to its roots

Vermont responds to its opioid crisis.

Vermont is one of the more forward-thinking states in the nation with a history of taking groundbreaking approaches to complex social issues. In his Jan 8, 2014 State of the State Address, Vermont Governor Peter Shumlin announced that Vermont was in the midst of an opioid addiction epidemic. Though Vermont had called attention to its opioid crisis, it soon became clear that many other states sh...

The Opioid Crisis and Its Consequences.

The Opioid Crisis From Research to Practice.

I n 2015, researchers from Yale University published a randomized, controlled trial on the treatment of opioid addiction.1 The study asked whether patients identified in the emergency department would benefit from prompt access to the well-proven medication buprenorphine, including onsite prior to discharge. The researchers were questioning not what, how, why, or who—but where. The results of t...

Incentive Roots of the Securitization Crisis and Its Early Mismanagement

Structured securitizations transform traditional default and interest-rate risks into hard-to-understand and hard-to-monitor counterparty and funding risks that in distressed times pass onto financial safety nets. This Essay explains the chain of incentive conflicts that led private and government supervisors to neglect their commonsense moral obligation to understand and control these risks an...

Seeking Solutions to the Opioid Crisis.

At an event focusing on population-health approaches to the opioid epidemic, discussants agreed that better coordination of care, community involvement in finding solutions, and more consistent use of improved pain-control options are required.