Policing Patients: Treatment and Surveillance on the Frontlines of the Opioid Crisis

Policing Patients reveals how technology embeds surveillance logics in medicine, forcing care providers to police their patients and undermining public trust, while also highlighting the need for treatment, prevention, and harm reduction in the opioid crisis.

Format: Hardback
Length: 304 pages
Publication date: 17 September 2024
Publisher: Princeton University Press

Surveillance culture pits healthcare providers against their patients, with doctors and pharmacists making critical decisions about dispensing opioids that alleviate pain but fuel addiction. Legislatures, courts, and policymakers have enlisted technology to curb prescriptions and prevent deaths, but this "Trojan horse" technology embeds the logics of surveillance in the practice of medicine, forcing care providers to police their patients and undermining public trust. Elizabeth Chiarello draws on hundreds of in-depth interviews with physicians, pharmacists, and enforcement agents across the United States to take readers to the frontlines of the opioid crisis, where medical providers must make difficult choices between treating and punishing the people in their care. States now employ prescription drug monitoring programs capable of tracking all controlled substances within a state and across state lines, blurring the line between medicine and criminal justice and pitting pain sufferers against people with substance-use disorders in a zero-sum game. Policing Patients urges medical providers to reaffirm their roles as healers and proposes invaluable policy solutions centered on treatment, prevention, and harm reduction.

Dimension: 235 x 156 (mm)
ISBN-13: 9780691224770