Title : Perceptions of opioid policy effectiveness and legitimacy in a community-wide sample
Abstract:
The urgency and dynamic nature of opioid overdose deaths has spurred policymakers worldwide into enacting laws to reduce opioid-related harms. However, since policymakers reactively design opioid legislation, many laws have been enacted with little evidence of effectiveness. Moreover, these laws often do not take into consideration the diverse opinions of people who use opioids (PWUO) nor those of community stakeholders who frequently interact with them (i.e., law enforcement, rehabilitation program employees, judicial system workers, etc.). As a result, attitudes towards drug policy differ between PWUO, stakeholders, legislators, and members of the general public. Our presentation will consist of a poster detailing an ongoing qualitative study which examines potential incongruencies and similarities between these diverse perspectives on opioid regulation, treatment, and penalization. As a part of our presentation, we will first discuss extant policy research regarding PWUO and community stakeholders’ opinions on controversial topics in opioid legislation (e.g., harm reduction sites). Next, we will introduce our study participants which include PWUO, community stakeholders, and members of the general public from a major metropolitan area in the southeastern United States. We will then overview our semi-structured interview procedure and discuss preliminary content analyses. From this discussion, we will highlight emerging themes regarding disparate perceptions of the criminal justice system’s utility as an instrument to dissuade opioid use, as well as communal opinions on America’s approach to handling its opioid epidemic. We will spend the remainder of the presentation discussing the generalizability of our findings, specifically apropos to our findings of perceived government efficaciousness in managing public health crises. This information may prove useful to other scholars conducting policy research with samples who possess a variety of lived experiences pertaining to substance use.
Audience Takeaway Notes:
- General members of the audience will learn of contemporary discourse surrounding opioid policy, including contested areas of approaching opioid treatment and penalization
- General members of the audience will learn where perceptions of opioid policy coalesce and differ among stakeholder groups from which they can compare their own perspectives
- Behavioral and community science researchers will learn of additional avenues for policy research on a community-wide scale
- Behavioral and community science researchers will learn how participants’ responses to our study compare to individuals from their respective communities and participant pools
