CORE Metadata, citation and similar papers at core.ac.uk Provided by Georgetown Law Scholarly Commons Georgetown University Law Center Scholarship @ GEORGETOWN LAW 2019 The Kids Are Not Alright: Leveraging Existing Health Law to Attack the Opioid Crisis Upstream Yael Cannon Georgetown University Law Center,
[email protected] This paper can be downloaded free of charge from: https://scholarship.law.georgetown.edu/facpub/2185 https://ssrn.com/abstract=3424994 The Kids Are Not Alright: Leveraging Existing Health Law to Attack the Opioid Crisis Upstream, 71 Fla. L. Rev. 765 (2019) This open-access article is brought to you by the Georgetown Law Library. Posted with permission of the author. Follow this and additional works at: https://scholarship.law.georgetown.edu/facpub Part of the Health Law and Policy Commons, Insurance Law Commons, Legislation Commons, and the Social Welfare Law Commons THE KIDS ARE NOT ALRIGHT: LEVERAGING EXISTING HEALTH LAW TO ATTACK THE OPIOID CRISIS UPSTREAM Yael Cannon* Abstract The opioid crisis is now a nationwide epidemic, ravaging both rural and urban communities. The public health and economic consequences are staggering; recent estimates suggest the epidemic has contracted the U.S. labor market by over one million jobs and cost the nation billions of dollars. To tackle the crisis, scholars and health policy initiatives have focused primarily on downstream solutions designed to help those who are already in the throes of addiction. For example, the major initiative announced by the U.S. Surgeon General promotes the dissemination of naloxone, which helps save lives during opioid overdoses. This Article argues that the urgency and gravity of the opioid crisis demand a very different approach.