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

by Helena Hansen, Jules Netherland, David Herzberg

Overview

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.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780520384071
Publisher:	University of California Press
Publication date:	03/28/2023
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	384
Sales rank:	890,073
File size:	8 MB

About the Author

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.

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 

Editorial Reviews

"Psychiatrist and anthropologist Hansen, policy advocate and sociologist Netherland, and historian Herzberg richly scrutinise drug use and race along multiple axes that include medicine, public policy, and history to emerge with a powerful portrait of precisely how the social construct of race and systemic racism have both created and blinded us to the unequal treatment of Black and white drug users. Through anthropology, personal histories, and nuanced data analysis this troika engages in textured, deeply researched, scholarship."

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