Advocacy through Scholarship: Professor Kelly Gillespie and her research on the law and policy of substance abuse disorder and opioid prescribing
11/28/2023
Professor Kelly Gillespie, J.D., Ph.D. (VSN '91, LAW '04, GRAD PH '15) (previously Kelly Dineen) has always been a caretaker. Her scholarship puts a magnifying glass on the laws and policies that stigmatize and discriminate against people in certain groups and force health care providers to choose between their ethical obligations and legal compliance.
Much of her recent research has involved the treatment of people who use drugs (prescription or illegal controlled substances), including people with chronic pain conditions and people with substance use disorder. She is particularly interested in the ways membership in more than one stigmatized group compounds that discrimination (for example, such as for Black women with the disability of substance use disorder). Whether it is caring for patients in a hospital or by caring for those who are often disenfranchised by our health care system through her scholarship, Gillespie’s career path and her continued success is reflective of her nature and of the health law community where she has developed.
Gillespie’s early career as a registered nurse has greatly influenced her academic research and scholarship. As a young nurse in the late 1990s and early 2000s, after working for five years in an ICU, Gillespie worked for a neurosurgeon with a subspecialty in caring for patients with chronic pain conditions that were not able to be resolved by other physicians. As their primary point of contact, she triaged their questions and concerns, helped coordinate the timing and any changes to their prescriptions, which included long-term opioid therapy, and reviewed opioid treatment agreements. In what she calls a “decade of pain and the era of Oxycontin”, Gillespie saw firsthand the difficult tradeoffs involved in taking care of patients with chronic persistent pain. For some the high dosage of pain medication were life changing and allowed them to return to their daily life and for others, it was not helpful and contributed to underlying addiction.
It was this experience that drove Gillespie to earn her J.D. with a certificate in health law and later her Ph.D. in health care ethics both from Saint Louis University. And it was this experience that drives her scholarship and advocacy today. From 2018-2023, she was the co-chair of the American Bar Association’s Opioid Crisis Task Force and has authored multiple articles on the topic, including articles in CATO Supreme Court Review, Journal of Law, Medicine, & Ethics, and several chapters of Oxford University Press’ “Prescription Drug Diversion and Pain: History, Policy, and Treatment,” which she co-edited.
A believer of putting policy to practice. Gillespie says of her work, “One of the questions we need to ask is: how are we using law and policy to show respect, or fail to show respect, to certain populations, including marginalizing already racialized and minoritized people?”
One recent practice has been the co-authoring of two amicus briefs for the United States Supreme Court. In the case of Ruan v United States, Gillespie and her colleagues argued in support of the physician petitioner, an opinion that Court ultimately sided with, holding that conviction of a prescribing practitioner for drug distribution under the Controlled Substances Act required proof that the practitioner intended or knew they were acting outside their authorization to prescribe controlled substances.
Though renowned for her scholarship, it is her teaching that brings Gillespie the most joy. Having started her career in academia at the Center for Health Law Studies, she most recently served as the director of the health law program at Creighton University School of Law. She joined the faculty at SLU LAW in January of 2023.
Of her teaching Gillespie says, “I really want to push students to see the structural issues with the law and how the law exists within a social, historical, and cultural context and how it can be used to reinforce power structures and oppress people but can also be used as tool of equity. I want them to identify both the stated and unstated intentions for laws and whether the law’s operation reduces or induces harm.”
Recent Scholarship:
US Supreme Court Delivers Much-Needed Certainty To Controlled Substances Prescribing
Defining Misprescribing to Inform Opioid Policy
Brief of Amici Curiae Professors of Health Law and Policy in Support of Petitioner,
Ruan v. United States, No. 20-1410
Ending the War on People with Substance Use Disorders in Health Care
Substance Use Disorder, Discrimination, and The CARES Act: Using Disability Law to
Strengthen New Protections
— By Jessica Ciccone