Policing Patients - by Elizabeth Chiarello (Hardcover)

Book Synopsis

A book that takes you inside the culture of surveillance that pits healthcare providers against their patients

Doctors and pharmacists make critical decisions every day about whether to dispense opioids that alleviate pain but fuel addiction. Faced with a drug crisis that has already claimed more than a million lives, legislatures, courts, and policymakers have enlisted the help of technology in the hopes of curtailing prescriptions and preventing deaths. This book reveals how this "Trojan horse" technology embeds the logics of surveillance in the practice of medicine, forcing care providers to police their patients while undermining public trust and doing untold damage to those at risk.

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. Chiarello describes how the reliance on these databases blurs the line between medicine and criminal justice and pits pain sufferers against people with substance-use disorders in a zero-sum game.

Shedding critical light on this brave new world of healthcare, Policing Patients urges medical providers to reaffirm their roles as healers and proposes invaluable policy solutions centered on treatment, prevention, and harm reduction.

Review Quotes

"Winner of the Donald Light Book Award, Medical Sociology Section of the American Sociological Association"

"Winner of the Herbert Jacob Book Prize, Law and Society Association"

"Winner of the Senior Faculty Scholarly Works Book Award, Saint Louis University"

"A spellbinding and provocative exploration of how health care providers, hospitals, pharmacies, the criminal justice system, and lawmakers try, flail, and ultimately fail to treat an intractable national social problem. . . . Highly accessible and reads like a long-form magazine article."-- "Choice"

"A Swiss Army knife of a book. [Policing Patients] offers tools to explain the opioid-involved overdose crisis, the plight of pain patients, the contradictory roles of doctors and pharmacists, our dysfunctional health care and drug treatment systems, and how the Drug Enforcement Administration surveils and bullies anyone involved with an opioid prescription. . . . Indispensable."---Helen Redmond, Filter Magazine

"Gripping. . . . Chiarello doesn't flinch from the complexities of the story she tells."---Sarah Fenske, St. Louis Magazine

About the Author

Elizabeth Chiarello is associate professor of sociology at Saint Louis University, a former fellow at the Harvard Radcliffe Institute, and a frequent public commentator on opioid-related topics. She and her work have been featured in USA Today and on Bloomberg News, among other leading media outlets. Her work is supported by the National Science Foundation.