Fighting the Opioid Epidemic
USC Schaeffer Center's Jason Doctor and Keck School of Medicine of USC's Ricky Bluthenthal discuss the epidemiological analysis and related issues that led to the ongoing nationwide opioid epidemic facing the U.S. population today, including possible solutions to defeat the opioid crisis.
Jason Doctor is Associate Professor and Chair of the Department of Health Policy and Management at the University of Southern California’s Price School of Public Policy. He is also the Director of Health Informatics at the USC Leonard D. Schaeffer Center for Health Policy & Economics. His research program centers on decision-making in healthcare and health informatics. Doctor specializes in behavioral economics and the use of choice architecture to affect policy in health and medicine.
Ricky N. Bluthenthal is the Associate Dean for Social Justice and a Professor in the Department of Preventive Medicine and the Institute for Prevention Research at the Keck School of Medicine of USC. His current research includes randomized controlled trial to test the efficacy of a single session intervention to reduce injection initiation risk behaviors among established people who inject drugs and an observational epidemiological study to examine if increased cannabis availability results to decreased opioid use among people who inject drugs.