Turning the Tide: Policy Approaches to the Opioid Crisis

During his tenure (2012–2024) as Burlington’s mayor, Miro Weinberger championed an aggressive, multi-pronged response to the opioid epidemic by treating addiction as a public health crisis and forging innovative partnerships​. With his Chief of Police, Brandon del Pozo, he launched “CommunityStat,” a data-driven coordination effort that united local police, health providers, social services, and state agencies in a shared strategy​, and embraced a wide range of harm reduction strategies, while also attempting to intensify interdiction of opioid traffickers. In 2018, this comprehensive approach yielded a 50% decline in opioid overdose fatalities, one of the largest drops anywhere in the country. However, in the wake of the pandemic, fentanyl arriving in Burlington, and Burlington’s loss of more than 40% of its police officers, the city experienced devastating reversals of this progress.  

Mayor Weinberger and Chief Del Pozo — now an Assistant Professor at Brown researching public safety and justice with a focus on substance use, the overdose crisis, and violence — will discuss lessons learned from a decade on the front lines of this ongoing public health crisis.