Big Marijuana -- Lessons from Big Tobacco

Sharon Levy, MD, MPH is a board certified Developmental-Behavioral Pediatrician and an Assistant Professor of Pediatrics at Harvard Medical School; she also has a Master’s degree from the Harvard School of Public Health. She is the Director of the Adolescent Substance Abuse Program in the Division of Developmental Medicine at Boston Children's Hospital, which is comprised of clinical, research, training and policy arms. She has evaluated and treated hundreds of adolescents with substance use disorders, and has taught national curricula and published extensively on the outpatient management of substance use disorders in adolescents, including screening and brief advice in primary care, the use of drug testing and the outpatient management of opioid dependent adolescents. She is the PI of the SAMHSA-funded adolescent SBIRT project and an NIAAA-funded study validating the youth alcohol screening tool in a population of youth with chronic medial illness. Dr. Levy currently serves as the chair of the American Academy of Pediatrics Committee on Substance Abuse.

Dr. Richter conducts federally-funded research on tobacco treatment in rural primary care and hospitals and pursues research and advocacy to expand access to high-quality treatment among the medically underserved. She directs UKanQuit at KUMed, a bedside tobacco treatment service for hospital inpatients, which has treated over 20,000 inpatients since 2006. She is an active member of SRNT (the Society for Research on Nicotine and Tobacco) and ATTUD (the Association for the Treatment of Tobacco Use and Dependence) and is former president of the Kansas Public Health Association and the U.S. Association for Medical Education and Research on Substance Abuse (AMERSA). She has a national certificate in tobacco treatment practice (NCTTP) and is certified to deliver the University of Massachusetts Tobacco Treatment Specialist (TTS) training.