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RTI Fellow Program Seminar Series
Never Before in History: Truly Taking Fentanyl Seriously
Date & Time
Sep 12, 2024 12:00 PM in Eastern Time (US and Canada)
Registration
https://lnkd.in/enXUW8tK
Description
Over the past decade, people in the United States and Canada have been hit hardest by illicitly-manufactured fentanyl (IMF). These countries—together with their states and provinces—have responded with funding and policies that include interdiction, criminal penalties, harm reduction, and medical treatment.
Nonetheless, our efforts are plodding and woefully disproportionate to IMF’s harm. Never before in civil society has there been a threat like this: a ubiquitous, immediately lethal, cheap, easily-transportable, non-infectious substance. IMF threatens experienced opioid users, users of other illicit substances, experimenting adolescents, and unaware infants. Because IMF is unprecedented, we do not have a comprehensive set of effective interventions to turn to.
We must recognize that IMF represents an existential threat and has no natural conclusion (as with immunity to infections) to its tragic impacts. This presentation will place IMF in historical context, examine the challenges it poses to traditional institutions and actors, and present ideas for interventions that truly take it seriously.
Speaker
Stephen A. Martin, MD, EdM, FAAFP, FASAM
Professor UMass Chan Medical School
A graduate of Williams College, Harvard Graduate School of Education, Harvard Medical School, and residency in Family Medicine at Boston University, Steve was a National Health Service Scholar for a rural community health center and a Federal Prison Medical Center. He has since worked for nearly 15 years at the Barre Family Health Center in rural central Massachusetts where he is medical director of its Office-Based Addiction Treatment program and a professor of Family Medicine and Community Health at the UMass Chan Medical School. He is also the medical director for research, education, and quality for Boulder Care—a company providing telehealth-only care for substance use disorders primarily for patients with Medicaid.
Steve’s clinical and research interests include primary care, oral health, complex care, addiction medicine, chronic pain, diagnostic error, scaling practices, and health disparities. He is lead or senior author of publications in the BMJ, JAMA, Lancet, Annals of Internal Medicine, American Family Physician, the Journal of Addiction Medicine, Substance Use & Addiction Journal, and the American Journal of Public Health. Steve serves as chair of the Massachusetts Medical Society’s Oral Health Committee and as a member of the American Society of Addiction Medicine’s Quality Improvement Council.
