An Evening With Elizabeth Chiarello and Francine Berman

*This event has been postponed and will be rescheduled at a later date.*

Join us for an evening with Elizabeth Chiarello in conversation with Francine Berman for a discussion of Elizabeth’s latest release, Policing Patients, at The Williams Bookstore.

Elizabeth Chiarello is an 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.

In Policing Patients, 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.

Francine Berman is Director of Public Interest Technology at UMass Amherst, and a passionate advocate for the responsible use, creation, and management of technology.  Fran is a former Harvard Radcliffe Fellow, appointed member of the citizen Council of the National Endowment for the Humanities, and recipient of the 2024 Pioneer in Tech award from the National Center for Women in Technology.