Welcome to Season 4 of Public Health On Call, a podcast from the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health.

I'm Josh Sharfstein, Vice Dean for Public Health Practice and Community Engagement, and a former Commissioner of Health in Baltimore City.

Our goal is to bring

scientific evidence and experience to current topics in public health through engaging interviews

with scientists, community leaders, policy experts, public health officials, clinicians, and more.

If you have ideas or questions for us to cover, please email us at public health question at jhh.edu.

That's public health question at jhhhu.edu for future podcast episodes.

Today, our topic is an underappreciated way to save many lives from overdose by expanding

access to life-saving treatment for opioid use disorder

with medications in jails and prisons.

I speak to Dr. Brendan Saloner from the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health about a new report outlining a path forward.

The report is available at Americanhealth.j.j.u.edu. Let's listen.

Brendan, Ciliner, thank you so much for coming to the podcast. We're talking about overdoses,

and a lot of people are surprised to hear that 2020 was a high mark in the not good sense,

the historically high number of overdoses, more than 93,000 people dying of overdoses

in the United States. Yeah, we have a full-blown public health crisis going on right now

related to overdose risk. Our opioid crisis really accelerated in 2020,

and it's unfortunately bad news on many fronts.

So among the different strategies to save lives from the overdose epidemic is a renewed focus on people who are incarcerated.

Why has that become such a focus?

Well, I think the short answer is that people who are incarcerated are at very high risk of overdose.

One of the reasons for that is that many people who have an opioid use disorder, and that

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