Lobbying for Change in Addiction Policy

• In Event: Parties, Divisive Issues, and New Technologies

Abstract

Historically, Congress has responded to increases in high rates of drug use or overdoses by enacting punitive policies that harshly criminalize drug possession and sale—particularly when the target populations were Black Indigenous and Persons of Color (BIPOC). Moreover, persons who use drugs (PWUD) were depicted by lobbying groups as deviants, as opposed to persons who needed treatment (Musto 1999; El-Sabawi 2018), and were rarely invited to testify in front of Congress or otherwise take part in lobbying for policy change.

In addressing the opioid overdose crisis, in 2016, Congress changed their policy orientation by adopting an explicitly public health approach to the problem—defining the problem as a health or medical issue, not one of deviance, and characterizing PWUD as people in need of medical treatment. In previous studies, I have demonstrated that the composition of organized interest groups lobbying for health-oriented policies to address overdose deaths between 2014-2016 did change and included significantly more health actors than criminal justice actors (El-Sabawi 2018; 2019). Moreover, parents’ groups publicly lobbied on the side of health-oriented policies and persons in recovery were invited to testify in congressional hearings. These findings are in line with Baumgartner et al.’s (2008) extensive study of 98 policy issues, in which they found that changes in the composition of groups arguing for policy change increased the likelihood that policy change would be successful.

This study builds on my previous work, which included content analysis of organized interest group congressional hearing testimony on the opioid crisis, by utilizing the Lobbying Disclosures Act database to identify changes in the types of groups lobbying on drug policy from 1997-2016 and to measure the changes in the amount of money spent by these groups on lobbying. My initial analysis shows that the organized interest groups registered with in the LDA as lobbying on addiction(or drug abuse) policy were different groups than those that testified in front of Congress and provides insight into addiction policy lobbying over time—thereby giving us a more nuanced view of how changes in interest group lobbying are associated with changes in legislative policy orientation.

Author

• Taleed El-Sabawi, florida international university