Ernest Drucker is a longtime practitioner and scholar of public health, and author of the 2011 book, A Plague of Prisons: The Epidemiology of Mass Incarceration in America.

Drucker is Professor Emeritus in the Department of Family and Social Medicine, Montefiore Medical Center/Albert Einstein College of Medicine; Adjunct Professor of Epidemiology at Columbia University's Mailman School of Public Health; Senior Research Associate and Scholar in Residence at John Jay College of Criminal Justice of The City University of NY, and on the teaching faculty of the Bard Prison Initiative. He is licensed as a Clinical Psychologist in NY State and conducts research in AIDS, drug policy, and prisons and is active in public health and human rights efforts in the US and abroad. 

For 25 years (1980 - 2005) he was Director of the Division of Public Health and Policy Research at Montefiore/Einstein. He founded Montefiore's 1000 patient drug treatment program in 1970 and served as its Director until 1990. He has been an NIH funded principal investigator since 1991 and is author of over 100 peer reviewed scientific articles, newspaper and magazine pieces, edited collections and chapters, and textbooks. He was founding Associate Editor of The International Journal of Drug Policy; founder and Editor in Chief (with John Booth Davies) of Addiction Research and Theory (1993 - 2005); and is the founding Editor in Chief of the open access Harm Reduction Journal.