OxyContin is a great example of how everybody pays because black and brown people's pain is neglected as Helena was saying. And white people's pain isn't attended to in a way that doesn't serve their interests. There's research showing that patients with long bone fracture are less likely to be prescribed pain medicine than white patients. So then this racist understanding of how white versus black people experience pain ironically makes white people more vulnerable to this new wave of prescription opioid addiction.
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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