COVID-19 as a Frying Pan: The Promise and Perils of Pandemic-driven Reform

The imposition of new regulations can send industries scrambling to comply, fostering innovation in doing so. How we police and treat people with opioid use disorder (OUD), with recent widespread social unrest in reaction to police violence and systemic racism bringing the need for lasting structural changes to our justice system and social services into especially acute relief. Arbitrary laws and counterproductive policies previously subject to only incremental reform have given way to sweeping changes: people convicted of nonviolent drug crimes have been released from jails and prisons, the enforcement of drug laws has been cast aside as a priority, and the regulations surrounding addiction treatment medications and treating patients with OUD have been greatly loosened. These are changes many practitioners and advocates have sought for years if not decades, but they come with the reality that the old systems are culturally entrenched and likely to be resilient. It is critical that researchers evaluate these changes and synthesize the results with existing evidence in ways that empower efforts to make the most effective responses permanent. The COVID-19 pandemic makes for a challenging research environment, but its OUD-related interventions have created new regulatory systems that lend themselves to valuable opportunities for evaluation as natural experiments by the burgeoning field of legal epidemiology.