>> Last year, 64,000 Americans
died from a drug overdose,
most of them victims of an opiod epidemic.
Now, most of these Americans were adults
and so most media coverage
and policy focused
on this epidemic have focused on adults,
but what about kids?
There's a way that parents'
opiod misuse might spill over
and effect children, because opiod misuse
can impair a parent's ability
to adequately supervise,
care for, or bond with their child.
What should be done for these children?
Right now, data suggests that
many of them are ending up
in foster care, but that's a bad approach
because separating
children from their parents
is harmful and disruptive to development.
I like to say that my
discipline, public health,
has two foundational principles:
evidence, and empathy.
Both of these principles
emphasize meeting the needs
of these families as a unit
rather than splitting them up,
because evidence shows there
are effective treatments
for opiod addiction and these treatments
can help keep children
safely in their homes and out
of foster care, while
empathy reminds us that we
should treat addiction
just as we would any other
chronic illness, like diabetes.
My dissertation addresses
three questions essential
to this public health response.
How many adults with children
have an opiod addiction?
How many of them are receiving
any kind of treatment
and if not, why, and what
policies are helping?
And using data from a nationally
representative survey,
I've already begun to answer
some of these questions.
It turns out there's likely
more than 800,000 American
adults with an opiod
addiction who live with
at least one child, and fewer than 30%
of these adults report
receiving any form of treatment.
I find that these adults
with children are less likely
than their counterparts without
children to say they won't
get treatment because they're
not ready to stop using.
Instead, they're more likely
to say they can't find the kind
of treatment they think they
need, and this is consistent
with other research
showing that most addiction
treatment programs don't offer childcare.
I also find that these
adults with children
are more likely to say that
they won't get treatment
because they're afraid a friend
or coworker might find out,
and this emphasizes the
public health importance
of empathetic communication that does not
hold these parents morally
culpable for their illness.
In the future, I'll be looking at policies
designed to combat the opiod epidemic.
Most of these policies, like
prescription drug monitoring,
are designed to prevent overdose deaths,
but I'll be looking to
see if they help keep kids
out of foster care as well.
This evidence can inform
an empathetic public health
response, one that helps
families heal instead
of splitting them up because of
a preventable, treatable illness.
Thank you.
(audience applause)
