Whiteout: How Racial Capitalism Changed the Color of Opioids in America

Helena Hansen; Jules Netherland; David Herzberg

Published by University of California Press 2023

Whiteout

How Racial Capitalism Changed the Color of Opioids in America

Helena Hansen , Jules Netherland and David Herzberg

https://doi.org/10.1525/9780520384071

Overview
Contents

About this book

The first critical analysis of how Whiteness drove the opioid crisis.

In the past two decades, media images of the surprisingly white “new face” of the US opioid crisis abounded. But why was the crisis so white? Some argued that skyrocketing overdoses were “deaths of despair” signaling deeper socioeconomic anguish in white communities. Whiteout makes the counterintuitive case that the opioid crisis was the product of white racial privilege as well as despair.

Anchored by interviews, data, and riveting firsthand narratives from three leading experts—an addiction psychiatrist, a policy advocate, and a drug historian—Whiteout reveals how a century of structural racism in drug policy, and in profit-oriented medical industries led to mass white overdose deaths. The authors implicate racially segregated health care systems, the racial assumptions of addiction scientists, and relaxed regulation of pharmaceutical marketing to white consumers. Whiteout is an unflinching account of how racial capitalism is toxic for all Americans.

Author / Editor information

Hansen Helena :

Helena Hansen is an addiction psychiatrist and anthropologist and Professor of Psychiatry and Anthropology at the University of California, Los Angeles.

Jules Netherland is a sociologist and policy advocate and Managing Director of the Department of Research and Academic Engagement at the Drug Policy Alliance.

David Herzberg is a historian and Professor of History at the State University of New York at Buffalo.

Topics

Frontmatter Publicly Available Download PDF	i
Contents Publicly Available Download PDF	v
List of Illustrations Publicly Available Download PDF	vii
Acknowledgments Publicly Available Download PDF	ix
Time Line Publicly Available Download PDF	xii
Part One. Technologies of whiteness in the clinic, the statehouse, and the archive
1. Pharmakon of Racial Poisons and Cures (as told by Helena Hansen, psychiatristanthropologist) Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	1
2. How to See Whiteness (as told by all three authors) Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	22
3. Good Samaritans in the War on Drugs That Wasn’t (as told by Jules Netherland, policy analyst) Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	53
4. “Mother’s Little Helpers”: White Narcotics in the Medicine Cabinet (as told by David Herzberg, historian) Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	92
Part Two. Three Opioids: racial biographies
5. OxyContin’s Racial Precision Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	119
6. Buprenorphine’s Silent White Revolution Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	157
7. The Housewife’s Return to Heroin (and Forays into Fentanyl) Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	201
8. From Racial Capitalism to Biosocial Justice Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	240
Glossary Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	279
Notes Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	285
Bibliography Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	321
Index Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	355

Language: English
Publisher: University of California Press
Pages
- Main content: 384
Keywords: opioid crisis; epidemic; whiteness; white supremacy; addiction neuroscience; new biotechnologies; drugregulation; pharmaceutical marketing; overdose; policy; American healthcare system; racial bias; segregation; history; economics; politics

eBook

Published: March 28, 2023
ISBN: 9780520384071