Two Jack, Joseph and Morton Mandel School of Applied Social Sciences faculty members examined the public health and moral models of understanding addiction in an op-ed published in the Akron Beacon Journal.
Mark Singer, the Leonard W. Mayo Professor in Family and Child Welfare, and Lenore Kola, associate professor emerita at the Mandel School and co-director of the Center for Evidence-Based Practices, wrote the op-ed, titled “An epidemic about moral failure or a public health emergency?”
In the op-ed, they explained how the crack addiction epidemic in the 1980s and ’90s was largely viewed as a moral issue, and made a call for the current opioid epidemic to be viewed more as a public health issue.