Dec 2024
Expanding Access to Addiction Treatment
This paper explores practical strategies to expand access to addiction treatment for persons living with opioid use disorders (OUDs).
This paper explores strategies to expand practical access to evidence-informed addiction treatment interventions among persons living with substance use disorders—particularly persons living with opioid use disorder (OUD), who face remarkable risks of death in the shadow of an escalating overdose epidemic. Almost 100,000 Americans die every year from fatal overdoses. Despite recent declines, more than 70,000 of these deaths involve opioids. Expanding practical access to effective treatments, particularly to medications for OUD (treatments denoted MOUD by addiction treatment providers and researchers), is a central challenge in addressing the overdose epidemic.
Latest Updates
Kelly Leonard: How improv can help police do their job
Kelly Leonard joins WGN’s John Williams to discuss The Second City’s partnership with the Crime Lab’s Policing Leadership Academy that’s using improv to help officers improve their communication skills.

Novel approaches can chip away at gun violence, and make a big difference
In an op-ed for the Chicago Sun-Times, Crime Lab Pritzker Director Jens Ludwig argues that when it comes to gun violence, we’ve been focused on the wrong solutions – a key insight from his new book, “Unforgiving Places: The Unexpected Origins of American Gun Violence.”

New book challenges conventional wisdom on Chicago shootings
Crime Lab Pritzker Director Jens Ludwig joins WGN’s Mike Lowe for an interview to discuss his new book “Unforgiving Places: The Unexpected Origins of American Gun Violence,” and how the book challenges our conventional wisdom about why shootings occur and how we can make progress on gun violence.
