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.
Featuring Helena Hansen, Jules Netherland, and David Herzberg on how American capitalism and its illusions of whiteness both created the opioid crisis and shaped the response to it. We are discussing their book Whiteout: How Racial Capitalism Changed the Color of Opioids in America.
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