Science Friday - Pennsylvania Drug Laws May Limit Syringe Services | These Romance Novels Represent Black Women In Science

Episode Date: December 21, 2023

Pennsylvania Drug Laws May Limit Syringe ServicesPennsylvania is one of 12 states that do not implicitly or explicitly authorize syringe services programs through statute or regulation, according to a recent analysis. They are widely considered to be illegal outside of Allegheny County and Philadelphia, where officials have for decades used local health power to grant legal protection to people who operate syringe services programs.These programs have widespread support in the medical community, and expanding them is listed as one of nine “Core Strategies” for the tens of billions of dollars coming to states as part of settlements with drug companies for their role in allegedly fueling the opioid epidemic. A coalition of state attorneys general reached the agreements with the companies.Pennsylvania expects to receive more than $1.6 billion in opioid settlement funds, but the state’s ban makes it significantly harder for the money to directly support expanding syringe services in many places.Some supporters of syringe services programs operate underground. Carla Sofronski, executive director of the Pennsylvania Harm Reduction Network, said she’s not aware of anyone ever facing criminal charges for doing so in the state, but noted the threat hangs over them, and they are taking a “great risk.”Read more at sciencefriday.com.These Romance Novels Represent Black Women In ScienceThe fields of science, technology, engineering, and math (also known as STEM) are not particularly diverse. And despite a gradual uptick in diversity over the last decade, a 2023 report from the National Science Foundation showed that only 24% of people in these industries are Hispanic, Black, or Native American.Dr. Carlotta Berry is working to change that, taking an untraditional approach to encourage people from marginalized backgrounds to enter the sciences. She is, as she puts it, an engineering professor by day and romance novelist by night. Working under the pen name Carlotta Ardell, she writes youth-friendly romance novels featuring Black protagonists who work in STEM fields.SciFri producer and host of the Universe Of Art podcast D. Peterschmidt sat down with Dr. Berry, who is a professor of electrical and computer engineering at the Rose Hulman Institute of Technology, to talk about how she got started on this journey and why she wants to make STEM a little steamier.Transcripts for each segment will be available after the show airs on sciencefriday.com. Subscribe to this podcast. Plus, to stay updated on all things science, sign up for Science Friday's newsletters.

How did an engineering professor get into writing romance novels about science? It's not erotica. It is romance, okay? It's just telling a good sweet story with STEM as an underbelly to that. It's Thursday, December 21st, and would you look at the time it's Science Friday? I'm Cyfry producer Dee Petersmith. There's been a lot of attempts at improving diversity in science, technology, engineering, and math fields, also known as STEM. And even though there's been gradual progress here over the last decade, white men still hold. about two-thirds of these jobs. But Dr. Carlotta Berry, a professor of engineering and robotics, is taking a slightly different approach to encouraging people

from marginalized backgrounds to enter the sciences by writing romance novels that feature black characters who work in STEM. I sat down with Dr. Barry to talk about how she got started on this journey and why she wants to make STEM a little steamier. But first, Ira Flato talks with reporters about the legal gray area of Pennsylvania's syringe distribution program and how it's facing challenges amidst a windfall of opioid settlement money. In 38 states, it's legal to distribute syringes for drug use.

These sterile syringes are a big part of harm reduction services. Those are efforts to safely prevent drug overdoses. Public health experts are largely in support of this. But in Pennsylvania, a state with one of the highest drug overdose rates in the country, syrin services are in a legal gray zone. As the state is expecting a windfall from opioid settlement money, these crucial services could be left in the dust. Joining me to talk about this are two reporters who've investigated this.

Sarah Bowden, health reporter for WESA Public Radio in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, and Ed Mahan, investigative reporter for a spotlight PA in Harrisburg. Welcome both of you to Science Friday. Great to be here. Thanks for having us. Ed, $1.6 billion are coming to Pennsylvania. Where exactly is this money coming from? That $1.6 billion is coming from drug companies for their role in allegedly fueling the opioid epidemic.

That figure includes nearly a dozen companies. Some are manufacturers, some are distributors, and others are retailers. The payment periods vary. Some go as long as 18 years. And there are even additional bankruptcy proceedings that could bring more money to the state. Wow. And people here say that money is desperately needed. Last year, more than 5,000 people died from a drug overdose in Pennsylvania.

the large majority of those deaths were opioid-related and involved fentanyl. So the money is aimed at reducing those drug overdose deaths? Yeah, exactly. So when the bipartisan coalition of Attorney's General reach settlements with these drug companies, they put in language describing how the bulk of the money should go to care, treatment, and other programs to address the misuse of opioids. They identified some specifically approved uses and also nine core strategies. Those core strategies include in a lot of Oxone, the drug that can reverse opioid overdoses, expansion of recovery services, treatment for people in jail, and also expanding syringe services. And these programs do a lot of things, including allowing

people to access sterile syringes and injection equipment. Now, Sarah, let's get into that a bit, because as we all know, there's a lot of controversy around syringe services. What's the public health reasoning behind this intervention? Sure. So people who use illicit drugs often reuse and share needles and doing this exposes folks to a whole bunch of health issues, including skin and soft tissue infections. And this can sometimes lead to skin necrosis and sepsis. And also sharing needles can result in the transmission of bloodborne viruses like HIV and Hep C. You know, we're talking about serious potentially life-threatening or lifelong health complications. And so by providing people's sterile syringes, it can prevent these serious health issues. So that's well known.

there's data to back that up. Yeah, definitely, particularly when it comes to bloodborne viruses, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention says that syringe service programs are associated with a 50% reduction in HIV and hep C virus incidents. The question about whether or not it prevents skin infections hasn't been studied as much, though because of issues like sepsis or endocratitis, which can occur with people who use injection drugs. Healthcare professionals say syringe services are a very important public health intervention. Also, something important to note is that oftentimes when public health workers are distributing syringes, they'll provide wound care, which can head off more serious complications.

Also, I want to note that syringe services can also be an important catalyst to get people into addiction treatment. In fact, people who enter recovery data show that they're more likely to be successful in that treatment as well. And that's because syringe services, you know, they really make a point of meeting people where they are without judgment, and that can provide people the mental and emotional safety to kind of make an honest assessment of their life and then seriously consider treatment, which, of course, is a really big commitment. Right, right. And I know you spoke with people who work for syringe service programs, right? Yeah, definitely. And what I heard from them is just frankly a lot of pragmatism for the reasons

I cited. They're like, you know, this is an effective way to help people be healthier who use drugs, so why wouldn't we do this? And, you know, a lot of people are willing to take the legal risk of running an unsanctioned syringe service program because either they have used injection drugs in the past or there's somebody who they love, who is currently an injection drug user or is in recovery. And so for them, you know, it's very much a calling. You know, one person, Ed and I spoke to in our reporting is this woman named Kim Bautaker. She runs a small syringe service program in a very rural part of Western Pennsylvania. And, you know, this is what she told me about why she's willing to take the legal risk of doing what she does.

So we're just trying to keep people from getting the diseases that are just not necessary to be getting. And, you know, are they going to quit overnight? Because we ask them to, nope, so let's help them stay well until we can get them to that point. And, Ed, what's the legal landscape of syringe services in Pennsylvania? If people distribute syringes, are they in legal jeopardy? So in Pennsylvania, it's a misdemeanor crime to possess or distribute drug paraphernalia. And the state's definition of drug paraphernalia include syringes, needles, and other objects used or intended to be used to inject illicit drugs. So to answer your question, yes, they are.

Because unlike a number of other states, we don't have an exception for people who are providing syringes as a harm-reducting. approach. And one thing I'll note is that decades ago, officials in Philadelphia and Allegheny County created legal protections for people operating these programs. They argue they had the power to do so because of their public health power. But in most or all of the rest of the state, syringe service operators don't have those protections. So, Ed, what would it take that to change Pennsylvania's laws? Do you think that's likely to happen even? So we spoke with a Republican lawmaker who's trying to do just that to change the law. Jim Struzy of Indiana County lost his brother to a drug overdose in 2014, and we have a clip of him here describing how that has

changed his own thinking about these issues. I don't think he had the proper resources at the time, and I didn't fully understand addiction myself. I thought, well, just quit. But that's not possible for people that suffer from substance abuse disorder. It really is a disease that needs to be treated like that. His legislation would create an exception in our drug paraphernalia law for syringe service programs. But the politics here are tricky on this and many other issues. We have a Democratic governor, a Republican-controlled Senate, and Democrats have held a one-seat majority in the statehouse for much of the year. But many other states have done this, and there's a lot of opioid sediment money coming in. And the decisions that happen now about

how to spend that money are expected to have an impact in the long term. Well, we all know about Pennsylvania politics and how closely they are watched. We will be watching with you. Thank you both for taking time to be with us today. Thank you so much. Thanks for having us. Sarah Bowden, health reporter for WESA Public Radio in Pittsburgh and Ed Mahan, investigative reporter for Spotlight PA in Harrisburg. And if you want to read the full story, please, you can visit our website, science friday.com slash exchange. We have seen a lot of different approaches to increasing diversity in science technology, engineering and math, also known as STEM. And although there's been gradual progress here in these fields over the last decade, white men still hold a majority

of these positions, about two-thirds, according to a 2023 report from the National Science Foundation. Our next guest is taking a slightly different approach to encourage people from marginalized backgrounds to enter the sciences. Dr. Carlotta Berry is a professor of electrical and computer engineering at the Rose Holman Institute of Technology in Terre Haute, Indiana. and she's also the author of several science-based romance novels that feature black characters who work in STEM. Sci-fi producer and universe of art host Dee Peter Schmidt sat down with Dr. Berry to talk about how she got started on this journey and why she wants to make STEM a little steamier. Here's Dee. Dr. Carlotta Barry, welcome to Science Friday.

Thank you for having me. So you're a robotics professor by day. Can you tell me how you got into writing romance? Yes, absolutely. During the pandemic, I was working with three other black women engineering professors, and we were brainstorming ways to market science, technology, engineering math, to make it more interesting to diversify the profession by drawing in more black and brown kids as well as female students. And we thought about movies and web series. And then eventually we converged on fictional novels, just something so that when people imagine an engineer, they imagine more than just

Dilbert and McGiver and Sheldon, but they also think about romance novels or even just fictional books. Right. And what is your own history with romance novels? I have loved romance novels since I was in high school. I did not know, but at the time, I did not see a lot of characters that look like me. I wasn't really into STEM yet, but even just, you know, little nerdy girls who like math and science, but also wanted to, you know, have her happily ever after with her male interest. or with their spouse or whatever, their partner. And so I then said, I want to write books where I see myself experiencing the joys and

the difficulties and tribulations of my personal and professional life. You know, I could find an African-American romance novel or I could find a sci-fi novel. Every now and then, may have a professor in it, may have somebody in STEM in it, but it's just not prevalent. They're few and far between. And I think that is part of that marketing problem. I think it's very important for all people to see themselves in their literature, in their media. And, you know, I wanted to be a part of being able to do that.

Right. What was it like kind of going from writing dissertations and scientific papers to writing fiction? It was more than a notion. And it was way harder than I thought it would be. So, right, you know, we were naive. It was the pandemic. Everybody's at home. We're like, oh, we'll just knock out a couple of, you know, fictional books really quick.

The romance came later. But we'll just knock out a couple of fictional books, you know, easy, peasy, lemon squeezy kind of thing. It was not. It was not at all. And one of the main things was, as technical writers, we honestly did not know anything about the mechanics of fictional writing. You know, some of us read fictional books like myself. Some of us read romance novels. But there are things we just did not know, like about point of view, perspective, visual writing, like taste, touch, smell.

You know, so once after that year passed, and we still didn't have the books published, and we started meeting indie publishers and indie authors. And I got a writing mentor. They're saying things to me like, you're not telling us what the room looks like. You're not telling us what their hair looks like. What were they wearing? How did it smell? How did it taste? And, you know, as an engineer, I'm kind of like, I don't care about all that stuff.

You know, all that cloud mumbo-jumbo. But that's important, right? That's a part of fictional writing that I just did not know to do. And so I was kind of phoning it in. And I now know it's completely different. You're listening to Science Friday from WNYC Studios. So your first book is called Elevated Inferno. Can you tell me about the plot of that and the main character, Monet?

Absolutely. So Elevated Inferno is about a young lady. She's a computer science degree and she's getting her master's in computer science with a focus on robotics. She wants her work to be in human-robot interaction. where she designs robots to be able to work with children who may have autism or other types of situations like that. So in the plot of the book, she has an opportunity to get a wonderful internship. And she's running late. And she really wants this job. And then she gets there and she's on the elevator, finally on her way, and the elevator breaks down. And so she's in the elevator

and she's stressing. This actually happened to me. That's where I got this from. But anyway, so she's now stressing. So she calls her sister. And her sister's just like, oh, this is so delicious. We have to go on social media and live stream this. And so they live stream her rescue and the handsome firefighter who rescues her, his name is Reese, and he becomes her love interest. So the plot of the book is about her trying to balance pursuing her master's degree, dealing with parents who believe you go to college to get your MRS. And so they don't understand why she needs to get all this education. It's not really the way they visualize the world. why are you being so stemmy and technical when you need to just get married and have babies kind of thing?

And also having a younger sister who looks up to her as a STEM rock star, as well as having to balance that with an academic advisor or professor who just wants their lab work to get done, as a lot of professors do. I need you in there doing research, cranking out papers, and it sounds like that this new man in your life is starting to take your attentions away from where they need to be. So all of my books inject a little bit of either my experience or what other black women in STEM experience, along with some fiction. So there's many parts of it that are Easter eggs from relationships for my friends and myself. Yeah, I mean, it's a very personal book in a lot of ways. Do you wish you had something like this when you were getting into engineering? Absolutely. I tell people all the time, if there had been no Spelman College, I probably would not have graduated from Georgia Tech.

because I didn't know a lot about the challenges that black women in STEM experienced. Maybe if I had, I would have left, or maybe if I would have been equipped with more resources from the very beginning, it would have gone better and not been quite as difficult. So I spent a lot of my time not just writing these books, but also giving engineering professor advice series and STEM lessons on social media because I don't want people to start out where I started out, because I like to say, you can be what you cannot see, but it does make it difficult. So I'm trying to make it easier for the people that come behind me

by showing them some of the tools and resources they can use to be successful. Yeah, speaking of that, speaking of the audience, what has the response been like to both your books? It's been wonderful, and I think the most exciting parts for me are when people who are not STEM people can recognize it and relate to it and it be okay. I say that my genre is Black STEM romance, which I kind of made up, even though it's really contemporary fiction, African-American romance, women's literature. So because of that, I think some people just are immediate like, oh, no, this book has stem in the title.

I'm not reading that. I'm not a STEM person. But what I'm finding is the people who do read it, they can resonate with it. And I try not to overstem the book. I want STEM to be a focus because I want to normalizing Black women in STEM, but I don't want it to be so stem that it slides into science fiction or that the normal everyday reader cannot relate to it. So I like that. This is really just a simple old romance story. And it's interjected with a little bit of what people in the,

fields go through. And so it's been really exciting. I think the main thing is trying to get more people, more hands-on and eyes on the work and educating people about what this genre means. Sure. And I understand your students have also read it too and they find it like enlightening too. They have some of my colleagues and some of my students. I did not specifically tell them about it, but they found me on social media and, you know, after a little bit of ribbing of, oh, Dr. Berry writes romance novels. I think they got in and realized it's just a sweet little old romance. It's not erotica. It is romance. Okay. These are about happily ever after. It's not going to be 50 shades of gray or whatever you think it is. It's just telling a good sweet story with stem as an underbelly to that.

Yeah. They're absolutely high school appropriate books, I feel like. Absolutely. Well, Carlotta, this is great. I had a great time reading the book too and I'm looking forward to future installments in the series. Thank you so much for having me. It's quite an honor. Dr. Carlotta Berry, author and professor of electrical and computer engineering at the Rose Holman Institute of Technology, and you can read an excerpt from Elevated Inferno on our website, Science Friday.com slash romance. That's all for this episode. Lots of people help make the show happen, including Jason Rosenberg, George Harper, Kathleen Davis, Shoshana Bugsbaum. Next time, we'll take a look back at this year's biggest science stories. I'm Cyfry producer Dee Petersmith. See you then.