The editors of the Journal of Law, Medicine & Ethics always endeavor to keep the content of our symposium issues as current and timely as possible. It certainly helps that we have so many great collaborators working as guest-editors and authors, but we are also sternly challenged, paradoxically, by our publication's own popularity. With many, many fine symposiums competing to be in the pages of JLME, it is inevitable that we have a waiting list, and thus a topic that was once cutting-edge may lose some of its urgency. That challenge is not a concern for this issue, however; even a most cursory glance at current headlines would tell you that opioid addiction in the United States is a topic of tremendous importance involving individuals from virtually every walk of life. Our guest editors, Ian Ayers, Abbe Gluck, and Kate Stith, bring together an admirably diverse team of scholars, many affiliated with Yale University, to examine this extraordinary challenge to our public's health from a wide variety of perspectives, including law, medicine, public policy, public health, and federal and state governments, to name but a few. Generously supported by the Oscar M. Ruebhausen Fund at Yale Law School, this symposium underscores the very basic fact that to attack a problem as pernicious and all-encompassing as opioid addiction will take a massive, multi-pronged effort from experts and officials in scores of different disciplines, departments, and agencies, and all will need to be committed to implementing best practices in order to defeat this community-destroying calamity.

At this moment we are also proud to announce an exciting new feature in the pages of JLME. For the foreseeable future, each “independent” article (that is, articles submitted to JLME that are not part of a symposium) published in the journal will be accompanied by a short “commentary” article. These commentary articles will seek to place the longer independents in context and to highlight some of their most important points; they will also explore what questions remain beyond the scope of the article in question. We hope these commentaries will provide a jumping-off place for a richer and more nuanced discussion and understanding of the many fine independent articles we publish. This issue features four of these remarkable articles, along with their related commentary, and also three excellent regular columns edited by our usual triumvirate of Mark Rothstein, James Hodge, Jr., and Aaron Kesselheim. On the whole, I think this issue contains everything our readers want; a symposium featuring vital work on a critical topic, independent articles exploring varied corners of our multidisciplinary domain, and columns examining ideas in our most evergreen topic areas. I do hope you enjoy reading the issue as much as we enjoyed putting it together for you.