![]() ![]() ![]() The public response to White opioids looked markedly different from the response to illicit drug use in inner city Black and Brown neighborhoods, with policy differentials analogous to the gap between legal penalties for crack as opposed to powder cocaine. Thousands of White addicted people found themselves the center of media and political debates about how the country should respond to the latest drug crisis. By 2010, the National Institute on Drug Abuse (NIDA) noted increasing numbers of prescription opioid dependent people turning to heroin as prescription opioids became harder to misuse ( Volkow, 2014) because of new prescription monitoring programs and tamper resistant opioid formulations. The press reported a suburban and rural White prescription opioid epidemic ( Tough, 2001 Ung, 2001a, b) as prescription drug overdose deaths rose 117 per cent between 19 ( CDC, 2014). ![]() ![]() Beginning in the 1990s, rates of prescription opioid misuse – primarily Ox圜ontin ® – began to rise dramatically, particularly among Whites. Meanwhile, a very different system for responding to the drug use of Whites has emerged. Alexander (2010), Wacquant (2009), Hart (2013) and others make the case that the criminal justice system is, in effect, a new state-sponsored racial caste system. Although Black Americans are no more likely than Whites to use illicit drugs, they are 6–10 times more likely to be incarcerated for drug offenses ( Bigg, 2007 Goode, 2013). Drug offenses accounted for two-thirds of the rise in the federal inmate population and more than half of the rise in state prisoners between 19, with more than half of young Black men in large cities in the United States currently under the control of the criminal justice system ( Alexander, 2010), and middle aged Black men more likely to have been in prison than in college or the military ( Rich et al, 2011). The US ‘War on Drugs’ has had a profound role in reinforcing racial hierarchies. This less examined ‘White drug war’ has carved out a less punitive, clinical realm for Whites where their drug use is decriminalized, treated primarily as a biomedical disease, and where their whiteness is preserved, leaving intact more punitive systems that govern the drug use of people of color. Examining four ‘technologies of whiteness’ (neuroscience, pharmaceutical technology, legislative innovation and marketing), we trace a separate system for categorizing and disciplining drug use among Whites. This article uses the recent history of White opioids – the synthetic opiates such as Ox圜ontin ® that gained notoriety starting in the 1990s in connection with epidemic prescription medication abuse among White, suburban and rural Americans and Suboxone ® that came on the market as an addiction treatment in the 2000s – to show how American drug policy is racialized, using the lesser known lens of decriminalized White drugs. Although Black Americans are no more likely than Whites to use illicit drugs, they are 6–10 times more likely to be incarcerated for drug offenses. ![]()
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |