Wen, Baltimore's 33-year-old health commissioner, has always been a few steps—a few years, really—ahead of the curve. The daughter of Chinese dissidents, Wen grew up in inner-city Los Angeles, where she saw classmates and neighbors suffer from gun violence and drug addiction. At 18, she graduated summa cum laude from California State University. Then came medical school and residency, a Rhodes Scholarship, and work as a professor and emergency room physician at the George Washington University hospital. All the while, Wen made a name for herself as a patient advocate, giving several TED talks and penning a book, When Doctors Don't Listen.
Her boundless energy is needed in Baltimore. The city of 600,000 has one of the highest overdose rates of any city, with 393 fatal overdoses in 2015. During her tenure, Wen has re-vamped the way the city responds to clusters of overdose calls and made it easier for drug users and their families and friends to access naloxone, the overdose reversal drug. On the city's overdose prevention campaign, DontDie.org, she demonstrates how to use it. Last spring, she testified before Congress and spoke on a panel with President Obama about the city's approach to addressing the crisis.
Despite the whirlwind job—Wen works "all the hours," as her assistant told The Atlantic's Olga Khazan—the commissioner takes the long view when it comes to the drug epidemic making the headlines. Substance abuse and addiction aren't new to Baltimore, she argues, and are at the root of seemingly unrelated problems that the city has faced for years. Shortly after the death of Freddie Gray, she wrote a pointed Washington Post op-ed about how the beleaguered city's high arrest and incarceration rates and seemingly intractable poverty draw back to the need for substance abuse and mental health treatment. "Other reforms will not be successful unless these core issues are resolved," she wrote.
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