By Temple University Center for Public Health Law Research The Congressional Budget Office just released a comprehensive new report investigating the budgetary effects of a hypothetical increase in the federal excise tax on cigarettes and small cigars from, $1.01 to $1.51 in fiscal year 2013. The report’s level of sophistication is unprecedented in its ability…
By Scott Burris You’ve probably heard about the good news/bad news experience of Stephanie Bongiovi, daughter of rocker Jon Bon Jovi. A college student, she ODed on heroin, but help was summoned and she’s going to be fine. The (temporary) bad news for her (and longer term for others in her plight) is that she and…
By Scott Burris There’s so much we still don’t know about the prescription opioid problem. The partial remedies advanced so far reflect this: Prescription Drug Monitoring Programs, which in essence define the problem as doctor-shopping patients; treatment guidelines, which define the problem as doctors without expertise; and crackdowns on “pill-mills,” which see the issue as…
By Scott Burris We know, and now most people acknowledge, that police activity has some clear, and in some instances intentional, effects on health. To start with the obvious, police are instrumental in reducing the number of people who are murdered, assaulted, raped, or otherwise terrorized. Policing – like any form of social intervention –…
By Scott Burris Two thoughts for the Friday following the 2012 APHA Annual Meeting: (1) This is a public service message for public health lawyers and their extra-disciplinary significant others. The American Public Health Association now has a Health Law Section. This is a big step up, in organizational terms. Until this year, health lawyers…
By Scott Burris Kathy Ward is a veteran public health worker in Nebraska. She has a neat idea, which I summarize here in mostly her words: Public health policy needs more proponents who are knowledgeable and able to express their positions freely. The shortage of advocates presents a danger for public health in a time…
By Scott Burris Somewhere along the way, environmental law and public health law got separated. Despite the importance of clean air and water to public health – not to mention parks, recreation, salubrious zoning – the two fields developed independently in the law. That’s changing in a lot of ways, and one very good example…
By Scott Burris Graduated Drivers’ License Laws have apparently been a major success in reducing crashes among novice drivers. (A couple of studies have suggested the laws might just be postponing crashes, but so far that hypothesis remains unproved, and the weight of expert opinion seems to be that the association is spurious.) There has…
By Scott Burris, JD The National Football League has given the National Institutes of Health $30 million for research on traumatic brain injury. There is much we don’t know about the causes, effects, prevention and treatment of sports-related brain injury – but that doesn’t mean that we should put all our eggs into the basket…
By Scott Burris In a Perspective in this week’s New England Journal of Medicine, Michelle Mello and Glenn Cohen, both professors at Harvard, write about the prospects for using the constitutional Taxing Power to adopt innovative laws to advance public health objectives. Cueing off the Supreme Court’s decision in the Affordable Care Act litigation, Mello…
