Public health responses to the opioid crisis in North America

While much has been done in effort to reduce deaths due to opioid use, little progress has been made, which necessitates a more critical analysis of existing efforts, the continued implementation of novel approaches, and a move away from over-medicalizing the epidemic and towards considering ways of addressing the upstream social-structural drivers of opioid overdose, including those rooted in social-economic changes, racial disparity, and criminalization. However, as has been pointed out eloquently by Dasgupta el at., there is no “easy fix” to such problems.13 Still, until a broader approach is taken it is unclear whether real change in opioid overdose dynamics can be reasonably expected.