A Community Initiative to Fight the Heroin and Opiate Epidemic

Overview:

This is a 60-minute recording of a live webcast.

Joyce White Vance was one of the first five U.S. attorneys nominated by President Barack Obama. When few recognized the emerging epidemic of heroin- and opioid-related deaths, Vance, in her role as U.S. attorney, convened the first “Pills to Needles Summit” in June 2014 that overnight galvanized community leaders around this new public health threat. Through her leadership and determination, she established a new paradigm to address this threat to the public’s health that linked law enforcement, government, academia, public health, victims and advocates. Together these institutions, organizations and individuals have worked a long-term strategy that recognizes the complexities of this epidemic, and is sufficiently flexible to adjust to anticipated but unknown changes in the substances, the populations and the distributors.