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.
Whiteout How Racial Capitalism Changed the Color of Opioids in America
About the Book
Reviews
"Black people on drugs get police, prison, and methadone; white folks get therapy, sympathy, and buprenorphine. Meanwhile, the biggest dealers, pharmaceutical companies, get fines and wrist slaps, but continue to profit by creating addicts and then selling drugs promising a cure. Why? The answers are all here in Whiteout, by far the boldest, most important, most illuminating book ever written on the opioid epidemic. The authors trace the crisis to racial capitalism, the source of a world where white lives matter and Black, Brown, and Indigenous lives don’t; where white deaths are tragic and Black, Brown, and Indigenous deaths routine. They show that legalization is not enough. We must desegregate and decommodify drugs and treatment. And if we are to truly save lives, racial capitalism has to die."—Robin D. G. Kelley, author of Freedom Dreams: The Black Radical Imagination
"Whiteout brilliantly exposes how drug policy, biocapital, and addiction science have historically segregated narcotics by race, shielding white drug users from the stigma and policing targeted at Black and Brown communities. With diverse disciplinary expertise and personal stories, Hansen, Netherland, and Herzberg compellingly show that only by grappling with this medicalized whitewashing can we fully understand both the racist war on drugs and the opioid crisis—and collectively end their widespread devastation."—Dorothy Roberts, University of Pennsylvania, author of Killing the Black Body
"Hansen, Netherland, and Herzberg's Whiteout is a dramatic and much-needed challenge to our outdated ways of understanding addiction. They bravely place our drug policies in the context of the devastating and universal apartheid within which we all suffer. This book will change you and change us!"—Mindy Thompson Fullilove, author of Main Street: How a City's Heart Connects Us All
"Whiteout compellingly recruits sociopolitical development and persistent etiological mythologies such as blaming the victim, biological dimorphism, and malingering to buttress the authors’ claim that systemic racial disdain fuels the heavily punitive measures deployed against African American opiate dependence, casting it as a moral failure. The authors' insights, leavened with cultural sensitivity, contrast this approach with the empathic medical model adopted for whites and help illuminate for us the ethical path forward."—Harriet A. Washington, author of Infectious Madness and Medical Apartheid
Table of Contents
Contents
List of Illustrations
Acknowledgments
Time Line
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, psychiatrist-anthropologist)
2. How to See Whiteness
(as told by all three authors)
3. Good Samaritans in the War on Drugs That Wasn’t
(as told by Jules Netherland, policy analyst)
4. “Mother’s Little Helpers”: White Narcotics in the Medicine Cabinet
(as told by David Herzberg, historian)
PART TWO. THREE OPIODS: RACIAL BIOGRAPHIES
5. OxyContin’s Racial Precision
6. Buprenorphine’s Silent White Revolution
7. The Housewife’s Return to Heroin (and Forays into
Fentanyl)
8. From Racial Capitalism to Biosocial Justice
Glossary
Notes
Bibliography
Index