Miami, March 8, 2019 – Miami Dade College’s (MDC) Benjamin Leon School of Nursing Spring Lecture Series will present a comprehensive and collaborative discussion addressing the opioid epidemic as a public health issue from a historical perspective to clinical practice. Strategies for recovery will be led by guest speaker Dr. H. Westley Clark and a panel of local expert practitioners. Furthermore, he will also address the 2016 Surgeon General’s report on Alcohol, Drugs and Health with 2018 updates and key issues associated with opioid use disorders.
Clark is currently the Dean’s Executive Professor of Public Health at Santa Clara University in Santa Clara California and a distinguished Fellow of the American Society of Addiction Medicine. As the former Director of the Center for Substance Abuse Treatment, Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration (SAMHSA), he led the agency’s national effort to provide effective and accessible treatment to all Americans with addictive disorders. Clark was also the former chief of the Associated Substance Abuse Programs at the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs Medical Center in San Francisco, California. He contributed to the US Surgeon General’s Report on Alcohol, Drug Abuse and Health, and served as a senior program consultant to the Robert Wood Johnson, Substance Abuse Policy Program, and a co-investigator on a number of the National Institute on Drug Abuse-funded research grants.
The panel of local expert practitioners include: Judge Jeri Beth Cohen, Rita Tybor, Dr. Stephen Mcleod-Bryant and Marie O. Etienne. Cohen is a circuit court judge presiding in the Criminal and Dependency Drug Courts, a member of the Opioid Addiction Task Force and the chair of the South Florida Behavioral Health Network. Tybor is the Director of Student Wellness at Miami Dade College and recently received a SAMHSA grant to address substance abuse. She leads the health and prevention services for students and oversees student counseling. Mcleod-Bryant is a psychiatrist affiliated with University of Miami Hospital and Clinics-UHealth Tower. He has more than 20 years of experience in diagnosing and treating mental illness, such as depression, anxiety disorders, substance abuse, and schizophrenia. Etienne is a professor of nursing at the Benjamin Leon School of Nursing and co-chair of the MDC Medical Campus legislative affairs committee.