Description
"At a time when healthcare providers shoulder the blame for the opioid crisis, when the prevailing opioid story centers on how physicians fueled addiction and drug makers masterminded it all, the technology that helps law enforcement root out bad providers deserves close scrutiny. The technology here is prescription drug monitoring programs (PDMPs). PDMPs are surveillance technologies that track prescriptions for controlled substances, including opioids. These statewide databases compile all of the drugs patients receive, so that pharmacists have extensive information about drugs, even more than most medical charts that contain only information about a single doctor or hospital. We cannot understand the opioid crisis without understanding frontline workers' daily struggles, what choices they make about providing opioids, and why. Policing Patients is the first book to spotlight enforcement and healthcare workers on the frontlines of the opioid crisis. It invites readers behind the pharmacy counter, into the treatment room, and within the recesses of government bureaucracies to witness gatekeepers to medical resources and the enforcement agents who investigate and prosecute them. Drawing on a decade of research including over 200 interviews in seven states (California, Florida, Kansas, Kentucky, Mississippi, Missouri, and New Jersey), Policing Patients demonstrates how surveillance technology use blurs boundaries between healthcare and criminal justice. States implement PDMPs as cheap and easy alternatives to structural solutions such as expanding insurance coverage for pain and substance use treatment. People with pain and addiction need help, but providers lack opportunities to provide care. What happens to healthcare when providers possess enforcement technologies instead of healthcare tools? How do enforcement agents with no healthcare training decide which providers are playing by the rules? How do patients with pain or addiction fare in this brave new healthcare world? Policing Patients reveals how the opioid crisis and surveillance technologies designed to combat it have fostered a punitive turn in medicine. It is the latest manifestation of the national War on Drugs, a failed political experiment that has done more to drive up mass incarceration than reduce drug use. Criminal justice tools will not dismantle the opioid crisis. Placed in healthcare providers' hands, they are doing irreparable damage to patient care and public trust"-- Provided by publisher.
