Morning Briefing
Summaries of health policy coverage from major news organizations
Longer Looks: How A DEA Agent Took Down A Fentanyl Ring; Hunger, Addiction And Homelessness On Methadone Mile
The New York Times: The China Connection: How One D.E.A. Agent Cracked A Global Fentanyl Ring
Around 3 a.m. on Saturday, Jan. 3, 2015, Laura and Jason Henke awoke with a start at their home in Minot, N.D. Their dog was barking wildly. At the door, in the early morning shadows, they found a police officer and, behind him, a pastor. The officer asked to see Laura’s ID to confirm that he was at the correct address. Then he told them that their 18-year-old son, Bailey, was dead. The officer didn’t have many details. Bailey Henke was living in Grand Forks, three hours east of his parents’ home in Minot, and the police there were working the case. The officer gave Laura the phone number for a detective in Grand Forks. She called and wrote down what he said: overdose, fentanyl. Laura had never heard of fentanyl; she wasn’t even sure how to spell it. (Palmer, 10/16)
Boston Globe: The Angel On Methadone Mile
Last year the number of people experiencing homelessness in Massachusetts grew to 20,068 — the highest in five years. And 616,090 people are grappling with hunger. That’s 1 in 11 people. The numbers are not shocking to the 26-year-old Tibbitt. As a public health nurse for the last five years, she works for Health Innovations. (Osterheldt, 10/15)
Politico: Why We Don’t Know Much About Pot
To fully grasp the absurdity of U.S. marijuana policy, step into one of the two Dodge Sprinter vans that University of Colorado at Boulder researchers have equipped as mobile research labs — tiny desks mounted to the floor, outfitted with syringes, heart rate monitors, cognition games and binders to track hundreds of volunteer research subjects. Although pot is fully legal in 10 states, effectively so in 22 others that permit some form of medical marijuana, and consumed by nearly half of American teens and adults at some time in their lives, there is surprisingly little information about its effects on users. (Owermohle, 10/14)
The Atlantic: Why Eating Meat Is Unhealthy
Eating red and processed meat, the headlines declared, was no longer unhealthy. It seemed—at a glance—that a bad thing was now a good thing. The stories were based on a recently published analysis of existing evidence in which one group of researchers recommended that “adults continue their current levels of meat consumption.” This conclusion—which the journal that published the research called “guidelines”—was written by a group called NutriRECS. The group was formed recently, and has not previously made recommendations about eating meat. Some of its founders, however, published a similar article in 2016 saying that evidence was too weak to justify advising people to eat less sugar. (Hamblin, 10/10)
