Leo Beletsky

“All options should be on the table, but there are significant ethical concerns with initiating medication for addiction that might not be there for long term,” said Leo Beletsky, a professor of law and health sciences at Northeastern University in Boston. 

“It isn’t like we don’t have plenty of law enforcement, interdiction and prosecutorial tools at our disposal to dismantle drug trafficking organization,” said Leo Beletsky, a professor of law and health sciences at Northeastern University, who called the order the “latest episode in drug policy theatrics.”

Northeastern University Health and Law Professor Leo Beletsky said without the proper guardrails to ensure that medical standards are followed, large therapeutic communities in the U.S. could turn into something like work camps.

Massachusetts has one of the largest systems of involuntarily committing people for substance use-disorder treatment. That’s according to Leo Beletsky, a professor of law and health science at Northeastern University who served on the state’s Section 35 Commission.

“It’s been a very demoralizing trend, where we’ve seen oftentimes double-digit year-over-year increases, and so this decline is a welcomed change,” said Leo Beletsky, a professor of law and health sciences at Northeastern University.

“We’re finally seeing smart investments bear fruit, and then suddenly eliminating what works is going to have very sinister consequences for progress on overdose prevention,” said Leo Beletsky, professor of law and health sciences at Northeastern University in Boston.

Leo Beletsky, a professor of law and health sciences at Northeastern University who has studied the prosecution of overdoses as homicides, said the purpose of such cases is “performative. … They help policymakers, prosecutors, other folks, to signal to their constituents that they’re doing something about the crisis while actually likely making it worse.”

Leo Beletsky, professor of law and health sciences at Northeastern University and an addiction expert, said higher incarceration rates among Black men are a significant driver of overdoses. People who had been in prison are much more likely to overdose and die after their release, Beletsky said. Access to substance abuse treatment, including medication, also […]

Leo Beletsky, director of Northeastern University’s Action Lab at the Center for Health Policy and Law, said the apparent decrease is “unequivocally good news” after watching overdoses climb for years.

“I would probably characterize it as a backlash,” Leo Beletsky, a professor of law and health sciences at Northeastern University, says of the apparent trend, “against some pretty modest reforms that have been promulgated recently.”