2025/07/29 by Martin French · 1 voice
Psychology · #Counseling Practices and Supervision #Psychopathy, Forensic Psychiatry, Sexual Offending
paper · doi:10.1093/sf/soaf113
openalex publication_date 2025/07/29 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/30
The U.S. overdose crisis has taken more than 1 million lives…” (1). Elizabeth Chiarello hits the reader with this fact on page 1 of her detailed and important account of the seemingly intractable social problem that is the contemporary overdose crisis. This is a timely study of a hugely important issue, as the death toll so frighteningly illustrates. Following a summary of the book, I want to emphasize three of its strengths: its chronicling of a new(ish) actor in the longstanding struggle to regulate drugs; its empirical depth; and its teachability. As no book can do it all, I will also respectfully offer a few ideas for the future development of this vital research program. Policing Patients uses “a sociological lens” to show how both healthcare and law enforcement “have changed as a result of trying to solve the overdose crisis” (189). As Chiarello notes, law enforcement has “gotten better at investigating and prosecuting healthcare providers” (189). Under this pressure, healthcare providers—exemplified in the work of physicians, pharmacists and others—have intensified the policing of patient drug consumption. These changes “have been made possible by prescription drug monitoring programs [PDMPs]—two-tiered surveillance technologies that help law enforcement monitor providers and help providers monitor patients” (189). PDMPs have functioned, says Chiarello, as a kind of “Trojan horse technology,” smuggling enforcement logics into hospitals, clinics and pharmacies (5). The author’s investigation of this evolving situation—across 8 states and over the course of more than a decade—illustrates numerous problems with the status-quo and foregrounds the need “for lawmakers to go all in on harm reduction” (199).