Please join us for the upcoming Criminology Forum on Friday, December 6 in 406 Oswald Tower from Noon-1:00 PM. Miranda Galvin, Ph.D. Postdoctoral Scholar, Criminal Justice Research Center Pennsylvania Commission on Sentencing, at Penn State University, University Park will be presenting her research.

The opioid epidemic has cost nearly 430,000 American lives since 1999 and more than 5.6 million emergency room visits since 1996. While the characteristics of misuse have undoubtedly changed over the last twenty years, there is little doubt that the stage was set by the flood of powerful prescription opioids into the market and subsequent misuse. White-collar scholarship can offer a useful and important theoretical frame with which to understand the origins and amplification of the epidemic through the concept of capture. The research discusses several types of capture as manifested in behavior of Purdue Pharma, and the ways in which the capture of regulators at the Food and Drug Administration co-occurred with—and its consequences have been dramatically exacerbated by—the “deep capture” of doctors and patients themselves.