Congratulations to Eric Wish (CESAR), PI and Peter Reuter (Public Policy and CCJS) for funds awarded under the state's Mpower program. Mpower Funds awarded to CCJS are in support of one project in a set of studies on the effect of the opioid epidemic on pregnant women. Peter Reuter will lead the project, supported by a post-doctoral fellow and a doctoral student. The specific project concerns pregnant women in the criminal justice system. A critical gap in data and policies related to Opioid Use Disorders (OUD) is how pregnant women with OUD are handled in the criminal justice context.This project aims to develop guidelines for the treatment of pregnant women with OUD in criminal justice settings that reflect the emerging science, both from concurrent research being done by the Medical School at UMB and from other current research. The project has two components:
(1) To gather and analyze data on the rules governing access to opioid substitution treatment in a variety of correctional settings (drug courts, pretrial release, parole and probation) to describe the variety of rules being used and to develop estimates of the number of women who are subject to the different rules.
(2) Using the report from the first phase, along with a review of the research on the effects of maternal opioid use on neonates, as the basis for a workshop to develop guidelines for how these women should be treated in terms of access to opiate substitution treatment.
The project will run from 2018 to 2020.