The Infrastructure of Compassion: Rethinking Public Health in the Fentanyl Era
MacArthur Fellows Nabarun Dasgupta and Gregg Gonsalves examine how current drug policy fails people and what a more compassionate public health model looks like.
Why we picked this
Two MacArthur Fellows on the frontlines of drug harm reduction — this is the kind of evidence-grounded, morally serious conversation the fentanyl crisis demands and rarely gets.
The fentanyl epidemic has exposed deep failures in how American public health systems respond to drug use — failures that are often as much about moral framework as they are about policy design. Dr. Nabarun Dasgupta, a street drug scientist at the University of North Carolina, and Dr. Gregg Gonsalves, an expert in policy modeling on infectious disease and substance use, are both MacArthur Fellows doing work that challenges conventional approaches.
This conversation examines where current systems fail people who use drugs and what it would take to rebuild them around the actual people at the center of the crisis — drawing on community engagement, lived experience, and rigorous epidemiology.
Part of the Chicago Humanities Festival’s Bridgeport Day. Tickets go on general sale March 19.