People forgot about the idea and possibility of medical addiction just as they had by the 1990s. So it produced this other major public health crisis this time with a lot of fatal overdose because barbiturates were one of the key drugs. There was this remarkably successful addressing of those white market problems but once again with the exception the incredibly poor and brutally carceral exception of methadone those policies were not applied to these other kinds of drug consumers who had now graduated from being dope fiends to being junkies in popular parlance. They were still seen as either innately racially flawed or as immoral and purposefully deviant. And so these previous episodes reveal that the project of forgetting and drug policy
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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