The Role of Race in the Opioid Crisis

Today, overdose deaths are at record levels, but increasingly it is black people dying these days and the crisis has receded from the headlines. That so-called new white more sympathetically portrayed face of the opioid crisis did create the political space to advance progressive harm reduction measures. But that window may be closing in the overall punishing and lethal logic of the drug war which keeps incentivizing cartels to turn to more potent drugs like fentanyl.