Dr. Nabila El-Bassel explores how violence impacts women in the opioid epidemic by sharing the voices of women she and her research teams have interviewed over the past three decades in her latest article.
One night, a woman I’ll call Tonya got a compliment from a guy when she was out with her boyfriend. Tonya’s boyfriend cursed her because another man had complimented her. He said: “You give it to everybody, I want it too.” In anticipation of his physical abuse, she reasoned, “I could go off to Wonder World.” She then injected heroin, to be “in her own world,” she later told me.
Tonya is only one of the hundreds of women I’ve interviewed for my research with similar stories in the span of my nearly 30-year career studying the links between intimate partner violence, sexual coercion, substance use disorders and HIV.
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The Opioid Crisis: Medical Examiner Roles and Strategic Innovations
