Commissioner Ernesto Zedillo provided remarks at an event hosted by the Yale School of Public Health (YSPH), in collaboration with the Global Participatory Research and Ethics Program at the MacMillan Center for International and Area Studies at Yale, sponsored by Cultivating Conversation at Yale at the Office of the Secretary and Vice President of University Life and the Global Commission on Drug Policy.

In the welcome dinner for the two-day program, Commissioner Zedillo provided opening remarks, emphasizing the failures of prohibition and the considerable evidence of practical impact for harm reduction interventions, especially overdose prevention centers (OPCs).These conversations were then shared with state leadership in efforts to advocate for the establishment of OPCs in Connecticut.

The following day, Commissioner Zedillo took part in the panel discussion “Policy, Legal, and Ethical Approaches to Strengthening Harm Reduction in the US and Abroad”. Fellow panelists included Dr. Rahul Gupta, President of  GATC Health and former Director of the Office of National Drug Control Policy at the White House, as well as Professor Scott Burris, Director of the Center for Public Health Law Research at Temple University. The panel was co-moderated by Ahsan Ahmad, Research Fellow at the Solomon Center for Health Law and Policy at the Yale Law School and Cultivating Conversation Fellow at Yale, and Dita Bhargava, Board Member for Liberation Programs and Shatterproof. Both Ahmad and Bhargava are MPH candidates at the Yale School of Public Health.

The panel sought to discuss how to strengthen and expand harm reduction strategies and interventions at the U.S. state level, in light of legal complexity and barriers, considerations of political and public perception, yet also the strong scientific evidence base and moral obligation to save lives.