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Maia Szalavitz on Muck Rack

Maia Szalavitz

New York
As seen in: The New York Times, Apple Podcasts, CNN, Folha de S.Paulo, Medium, MSN, The New York Times en Español, Estadão, HuffPost, Nature, Post Everything (The Washington Post) and
Contributing Opinion Writer, New York Times. OUT NOW IN PAPERBACK: Undoing Drugs. Award winning neuroscience journalist. Quit cocaine & heroin in 1988.

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Articles

The best books on Addiction

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By Leslie Jamison, Maia Szalavitz, David Wallace
| Five Books
It’s clear from the history you tell in The Urge that a lot of ink has been spilt writing about addiction, and a lot of it is contradictory. What criteria guided your list today? That’s a great question. I found the list-making extremely challenging. I could have written five different lists: the academic list, the literature list, and so… I felt careful about the different constituencies that might be reading about addiction, the people who might look at the list.
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Overdose Deaths Are Dropping. Maybe Not for Long.

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By Maia Szalavitz
| The New York Times Verified
Overdose Deaths Are Dropping. Maybe Not for Long. May 14, 2026, 5:02 a.m. ET Credit...Ana Galvañ Ms. Szalavitz is a contributing Opinion writer who covers addiction and public policy. After rising exponentially since 1979, overdose rates have finally begun to decline, falling more than 29 percent since 2022. President Trump has repeatedly claimed that stopping these fatalities is a priority. But recent moves by his administration threaten to stall or even reverse this progress.
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Do We Really Need a Reminder of What the AIDS Crisis Was Like?

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By Maia Szalavitz
| The New York Times Verified
In 2003, a few weeks after Kamaria Laffrey, then 21 years old, gave birth to her first child, she received a phone call instructing her to immediately contact her doctor. The physician revealed that routine testing had found that Ms. Laffrey was H.I.V. positive. Fortunately, her baby was not. If she’d received the same news a decade earlier, the diagnosis would have been a death sentence.
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