The History of Opioid Addiction

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.