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President Trump and his minions cooked up a fake national security crisis to justify diverting billions of dollars to build a bigger, wider border wall to keep out of the hordes of immigrants he imagines marching across the deserts, hills and prairies between established ports of entry. It’s bad enough that he’s wasting money and time on a manufactured crisis, but it’s all the worse that he’s doing so when the U.S. is facing an actual crisis — one that is killing tens of thousands of Americans every year — and doing little to stop it. (3/29)

From my perspective as someone who entered the treatment industry as a patient in 1989 and who has remained in this space since then as a therapist and later as an academic, the stigma of addiction — or more specifically its branding — is powerfully negative. Physicians whose practices focus on patients with opioid use disorder don’t have to worry about their “brand” being harmed because it is tied to this treatment and this patient population. But a typical primary care physician in Manhattan or suburban Atlanta or rural Nevada might worry about the potential trouble that patients with addictions might cause in their waiting rooms. (David A. Patterson Silver Wolf, 3/29)

Tens of thousands of students recently walked out of classes around the world demanding action on climate change. It’s depressing that our children have to take to the streets to beg lawmakers to protect our planet. (Joni Ashbrook, 3/28)

Monday, April 1, marks the start of the American Public Health Association’s (APHA) annual National Public Health Week. The APHA has dedicated a day this year to the topic of violence prevention, including gun violence prevention. This important day comes on the heels of a congressional hearing on whether to provide funding for gun violence research to the Center for Disease Control for the first time in two decades. (Timothy Fabian, 3/28)

Early detection efforts always have the downside of turning more people into patients. Whenever doctors look for early forms of disease, they regularly find more people with it than they would have otherwise. In some, the detected disease is destined to intensify and cause symptoms, or even death. Earlier treatment may help them — or it may not. Others are overdiagnosed, told they have the disease yet it is not destined to ever bother them. Many more have findings that falsely suggest disease and require a battery of tests to attest to their health. (H. Gilbert Welch, 3/29)

A complex web of legal, policy, and structural barriers has led to persistent gaps in access to treatment for opioid use disorder in jail facilities in the United States and prevented the delivery of coordinated care. (Ingrid A. Binswanger, 3/38)

If your monthly income suddenly dropped by $1,500 — or even more — would you be able to weather the sudden change? For how long? For many Americans, a single unexpected financial hit like that would force them to borrow money or sell something; the prospect of seeing your monthly income suddenly and unexpectedly plummet for months — or even years to come — could be completely overwhelming. That is exactly what has happened to a significant number of veterans. (Kayla Williams, 3/28)

With all that’s going on in the world of law, I didn’t plan on writing about abortion again so soon. But as the tide of Supreme Court-bound abortion cases turns rapidly into a flood, it’s become a challenge even for people with a deep interest in the future of the abortion right to keep track of what’s happening and of which cases to worry about most. Thus, this column. Within the next few weeks, a challenge to Louisiana’s abortion law, which I wrote about last month, will arrive at the court as a formal appeal. Louisiana requires that doctors who perform abortions in that deeply anti-abortion state do the impossible by getting admitting privileges in local hospitals. (Linda Greenhouse, 3/28)

Department of Child Safety Director Greg McKay has finally broken his silence on the YouTube mother and her house of horrors.His message: don’t blame us for not catching on to the fact that Machelle Hobson was, according to police, basically treating her seven adopted children like slaves. (Laurie Roberts, 3/27)