2022: Rosalie Pacula, PhD

Rosalie Pacula, PhD, is a professor and Elizabeth Garrett Endowed Chair in Health Policy, Economics and Law at the University of Southern California’s Sol Price School of Public Policy. She is an economist whose research examines policies that influence a range of public health issues. Her topics of interest include the regulation of cannabis, opioids and other addictive substances, along with their treatment.  

Pacula is a senior fellow with the Leonard D. Schaeffer Center for Health Policy & Economics, where she co-directs the RAND-USC Schaeffer Opioid Policy Tools & Information Center of Excellence in addition to leading numerous National Institute of Health-funded studies examining the impact of federal, state and local laws on the supply, demand and access to treatment for intoxicating substances. She is currently president of the International Society for the Study of Drug Policy.

Among other roles, she spent 21 years at the RAND Corporation, serving as co-director of RAND’s Drug Policy Research Center for 15 of those years, working on drug policy studies for the United States and Europe. She served on National Institute on Drug Abuse’s National Advisory Council Cannabis Policy Workgroup, the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration’s technical advisory committee on preventing cannabis use among youth, the World Health Organization’s Technical Expert Committee on Cannabis Use and Cannabis Policy, the National Academy of Sciences, Engineering and Medicine Committee on the Review of Specific Programs in the Comprehensive Addiction and Recovery Act, and the CDC’s National Injury Prevention’s Board of Scholarly Counselors.

Pacula received her doctorate in economics from Duke University.