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Professor Ross D. Silverman, IU McKinney School of Law Professor of Public Health and Law, is profiled in the December 2019 edition of the CDC Public Health Law News.

The agency's monthly newsletter has more than 130,000 subscribers worldwide and had been in continuous circulation for more than 16 years.

As part of the interview, Professor Silverman discussed his current IU Addictions Grand Challenge project, the Indiana Addictions Law and Policy Surveillance Project. The project is grounded in legal epidemiology and involves collecting, analyzing, and sharing information about the characteristics of local law in all of Indiana’s 92 counties and looking at the positive or negative effects on the health of people with addictions.

Indiana is one of the states hardest hit by the opioid epidemic and the site of the United States’ first rural HIV outbreak. More than one-third of adults who get involved with the criminal justice system are people who have substance abuse disorders, Professor Silverman said in the CDC interview.

Professor Silverman described how data is being collected—traveling to dozens of county government offices across rural Indiana to collect, scan, and digitize the local laws—and the project’s second aim, which is to evaluate the employees and practices of courts related to Medication-Assisted Treatment (MAT), and understanding how decisions about MAT are made, especially in problem-solving court settings.

He also described his career path, and how it brought him to “wrestling with knotty questions about public health, healthcare, law, policy, politics, and ethics,” he said.

“I love that these challenges demand responses that are interdisciplinary, informed by evidence, sensitive to history and the unique needs of particular communities, and must be feasible and practical,” said Professor Silverman, who also holds an appointment as Professor of Health Policy and Management at the Indiana University Richard M. Fairbanks School of Public Health at IUPUI.