The Opioid Industry Documents Archive: National Symposium 2025, Day 1: Health Journalism, Law and Policy

Scott Higham is a Pulitzer, Emmy and Peabody award-winning journalist and author, nationally known for his investigative work for The Washington Post and 60 Minutes and long-form nonfiction narrative storytelling. Higham was a lead reporter for the Washington Post team that developed “The Opioid Files,” a series that exposed the inner workings of the companies that fueled the crisis and is credited with forming the foundation for the largest civil action in American history. Included in this investigative series is reporting on OIDA’s Mallinckrodt documents when they were first released in 2022. OIDA includes documents that were unsealed thanks to a lawsuit filed by the Washington Post and HD Media. Higham and his Washington Post colleagues also worked with Academy Award-winning director Alex Gibney to produce Crime of the Century (2021), a two-part HBO investigation into the forces that fueled the epidemic.  

Higham later collaborated with Lenny Bernstein at the Washington Post and Bill Whitaker and producers Ira Rosen and Sam Hornblower at 60 Minutes for additional investigations into the opioid industry. More recently, he worked with Whitaker and producers Graham Messick and Jack Weingart on an investigation into the Mexican drug cartels and the scourge of fentanyl in the U.S.  

Higham and Washington Post colleague Sari Horwitz co-authored the critically acclaimed book, American Cartel: Inside the Battle to Bring Down the Opioid Industry (2022) and Finding Chandra: A True Washington Murder Mystery. (2010). In addition to covering the opioid crisis, Higham’s award-winning news investigations have ranged in subject from the D.C. foster care system, abuses at the Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq, waste and fraud in Homeland Security contracting, and much more. 

Rahul Gupta, MD, MPH, MBA, is president of GATC Health, a technology company accelerating the future of precision medicine and leveraging artificial intelligence to transform drug discovery. From 2021-2025, he was the first physician to serve as Director of the White House Office of National Drug Control Policy (ONDCP), after being confirmed by the United States Senate. Reporting to the President of the United States, Dr. Gupta oversaw a $44 billion drug budget across 19 federal agencies. Under his leadership, the nation experienced historic declines in overdose deaths. 

A board-certified internist, Dr. Gupta has been a practicing primary care physician for more than 25 years. He has served as a local public health official and as the West Virginia Health Commissioner under two Governors. As the state’s Chief Health Officer, his leadership of opioid crisis response included expanding access to naloxone, harm reduction services, and treatment services.   

His lifelong commitment to educating the next generation of physicians and policymakers has led him to hold academic appointments throughout his career including as a clinical professor in the Department of Medicine at Georgetown University School of Medicine and as visiting faculty at the Harvard University T.H. Chan School of Public Health. Additionally, his passion for global health led him to join the March of Dimes as Chief Medical and Health Officer and Senior Vice President, where he provided strategic oversight for the organization’s domestic and global medical and public health efforts.  

Dr. Gupta has been recognized for his career of public service by the American Medical Association, the American Public Health Association, and by Governing Magazine, which named him their Public Health Official of the Year in 2018. 

Ashton Marra is a Teaching Associate Professor at West Virginia University, where she teaches news writing, video storytelling and community-focused journalism. 

Marra is the co-founder and co-director of Reporting on Addiction, a collaboration of addiction science experts, professional journalists and journalism educators who share a passion to decrease stigma and improve the way journalists cover addiction and recovery. Reporting on Addiction trains professional and student newsrooms and addiction science experts, creates research-based reporting resources, and has built a network of journalism professionals nationwide who are committed to improving reporting in this space. 

Marra has worked in both public and commercial media newsrooms in New York City, Ohio and West Virginia, and her reporting has appeared nationally on NPR and PBS, as well as “Good Morning America,” where she worked with correspondents across the country to produce video news stories in the field and in the studio. She served as the assistant news director for the statewide public television and radio network West Virginia Public Broadcasting and as its lead political reporter, hosting and producing the network’s flagship television program “The Legislature Today.” While working in public media, Ashton was also the producer and host of several radio programs as well as original podcasts. She was twice named the Associated Press of the Virginias Best Reporter. 

Corey Davis, J.D., M.S.P.H., serves as Director of the Network for Public Health Law’s Harm Reduction Legal Project. Davis was previously a Senior Attorney at the National Health Law Program (NHeLP), where he helped to advance access to quality health care for low-income and underserved individuals. Before joining NHeLP Davis served as Employment Rights Attorney at Equality Advocates Pennsylvania, where he represented lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender (LGBT) individuals before administrative commissions and in state and federal courts. He previously oversaw a street-based legal clinic sited at Philadelphia’s syringe services program. 

Davis has served as chair of a county board of health, chair of the board of the North Carolina Harm Reduction Coalition, and vice-chair of the North Carolina Public Health Foundation, among other positions. He is an adjunct assistant professor at the NYU Grossman School of Medicine and has published extensively in the lay and academic press.