LZ Granderson: OxyContin was not the first pharmaceutical advertised or attempted to be marketed as a non-addicted opioid. He says there had just been a racialized drug panic over so-called crack cocaine in which addiction had become relentlessly associated with racialized communities. LZ: To sell oxycontin in a certain way was to sell whiteness itself, like to sell the idea that white patients were somehow less vulnerable because of having perhaps less innate flaws.
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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