Daughter Draws On Lifetime Of Personal Experience As She Wages Fight Against Opioid Crisis
Brittany Pettersen, now a Colorado lawmaker who is battling the crisis in her state with legislation to curb the epidemic, uses her mother's fight against addiction to shine a light on the toll drug problems take on loved ones.
Los Angeles Times:
She's Spent Years Keeping Her Mom Alive. Now A State Lawmaker, She's Fighting The Opioid Crisis
A friend in high school once asked Brittany Pettersen if her mom ever grounded her. "No," she replied, "but I wish she would." Pettersen was never grounded, never badgered about grades, never hassled about anything. Her mother, Stacy, was too high on prescription opioids, drunk on vodka or strung out on heroin to care. (Kelly, 4/18)
In other public health news —
Los Angeles Times:
Attention Women: Your Choice Of Blood Pressure Medicine May Affect Your Risk Of Pancreatic Cancer
In findings with potentially broad implications for the public's health, new research has found that some women who treat their high blood pressure with a class of drugs that relaxes the blood vessels were more likely to develop pancreatic cancer than those who use other hypertension medications. In a large and intensively-studied group of middle-aged and older women, the risk of developing pancreatic cancer was more than twice as high for those who took a short-acting calcium channel blocker for more than three years. (Healy, 4/17)
KPCC:
What LA Can Learn From A Seattle Strategy To Fight Homelessness: Tiny House Villages
Los Angeles Mayor Eric Garcetti has a new proposal to use more emergency temporary shelters to get homeless people off the streets. Orange County officials are thinking about this sort of "rapid-rehousing," too, and have considered managed tent encampments in some areas. The city of Seattle has some experience with this. Since 2015, that city has been experimenting with temporary shelters that officials call "sanctioned encampments." Some are made up of tents while others offer people tiny houses to live in. (Henderson, 4/17)