Opioids medicines are the standard of care for treating severe pain. Drugs like methadone and buprenorphine have proven effective in treating dependency on heroin and other opiods. Access to therapeutic opioids is not only medically appropriate - it is the law. The world's drug control treaties...

Law enforcement activities have been found to negatively influence the health behavuor of injection drug users (IDUs) in many studies. This study, set in the Mexican border cities of Tijuana, Baja California, and Ciudad Juarez, Chihuahua, sought to identify factors associated with receptive...

Historically, public health law has been shaped by the social response to serious epidemics. Boards of health and full-fledged health departments were created in the late 18 and 19th centuries in response to yellow fever and cholera. Disease reporting, mandatory screening, and compulsory...

Governance, by which I mean the management of the course of events in a system, is an overarching issue of concern to health from an ecological point of view. Governance consists largely in the policing social relations, environmental conditions and the allocation of resources essential to...

Security matters to health. Crime victimization causes death, injury and illness. Injury or death is an occupational hazard for police. The criminal justice system causes injury and illness in the course of attempting to punish and deter crime. Policing policies and practices can have a...

Law enforcement activity has been found to influence health risk behavior of injection drug users. Repeated measurements and mixed effects models were used to analyze the effects of an intensive long-term street-level police action to reduce open drug sales on syringe exchange program use....

Throughout the HIV epidemic, criminal law has been invoked to deter and punish sexual transmission. The public health community has not favored the enactment of criminal laws specifically targeting people with HIV, nor endorsed the application of general criminal laws to HIV - but neither has it...

Social epidemiology has made a powerful case that health is determined not just by individual-level factors such as our genetic make-up, access to medical services, or lifestyle choices, but also by social conditions, including the economy, law, and culture. Indeed, at the level of populations,...

Objective: The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) funds and conducts research on legal epidemiology, which is the scientific study of law as a factor in the cause, distribution, and prevention of disease in a population. This study describes the results of a scan of articles...

A Rapid Policy Assessment and Response (RPAR) intervention was conducted in Szczecin, Poland, to assess the impact of drug policy on the health of drug users in the city and surrounding rural areas. In the RPAR, a team of Polish researchers worked with a Community Action Board (CAB) comprised of...