“I’ve always felt that I stumbled into this passion that I didn’t know existed,” says Allison Smith, Ph.D., Senior Program Administrator for the Louisiana Center Addressing Substance Use in Collegiate Communities (LaCASU) at the Louisiana Board of Regents (BOR) in Baton Rouge, LA and facilitator of the Louisiana Higher Education Coalition (LaHEC).  Early on, Dr. Smith knew two important things about her future career: she liked helping people and she was good with paperwork. In 2010, she found her way into the work of addressing substance use and overdose prevention through an internship at the Center for Substance Abuse Prevention (CSAP) with the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration (SAMHSA) in Washington D.C.

The perception of a pharmacist as someone behind a counter counting out pills is seriously outdated.

“Pharmacists are one of the most underutilized professions. I don’t think the public has taken advantage of their expertise,” says James J. Gasper, PharmD, a Board Certified Psychiatric Pharmacist (BCPP) with the California Department of Health Care Services.

Meet the Partner profile for Judy A. Gerhardt, CPP, a former Commander with the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department.

When Dr. Westley Clark says, “Youth always threaten the status quo,” he’s not just talking about the undergraduate students he teaches in his Substance Abuse and Addiction, Public Health Ethics and the American Health System classes at Santa Clara University. He’s also talking about himself.

“COVID has exposed so much of what is rotten. It’s like a storm came in and blew off the roof, and we found the walls were rotten,” says David Liners, director of WISDOM, a grassroots organization in Wisconsin comprised of people from 19 different religious traditions.

For the past 25 years Guzman has brought that passion to save lives of people infected with HIV AIDS, Hepatitis C and people with opioid addiction and other substance use disorders. She works through the lens of harm reduction.