We are delighted to announce the winner of this year’s Foundation for the Sociology of Health and Illness Book Prize is Elizabeth Chiarello for her book, Policing Patients: Treatment and Surveillance on the Frontlines of the Opioid Crisis.

This book draws on hundreds of in-depth interviews with physicians, pharmacists, and enforcement agents across the United States to take readers to the frontlines of the opioid crisis, where medical providers must make difficult choices between treating and punishing the people in their care.  States now employ prescription drug monitoring programs capable of tracking all controlled substances within a state and across state lines.  Chiarello describes how the reliance on these databases blurs the line between medicine and criminal justice and pits pain sufferers against people with substance-use disorders in a zero-sum game.

Shedding critical light on this brave new world of healthcare, Policing Patients urges medical providers to reaffirm their roles as healers and proposes invaluable policy solutions centered on treatment, prevention, and harm reduction.

The Foundation for the Sociology of Health and Illness (FSHI) Book Prize of £1,000 is awarded annually each September to the author(s) or editor(s) of the book making the most significant contribution to medical sociology/sociology of health and illness and having been published over the three years preceding 1st January of the year in which the award is made.

We extend our warmest congratulations to Elizabeth.