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Christina Elizabeth Sharpe, In the Wake: On Blackness and Being: Black people primarily, and other Americans also, live “in the wake” of slavery—still in some sense penned in the hold of the ships that delivered enslaved people to American territories. Sharpe uses the metaphors of the wake, the ship, and the hold to investigate how Black people make meaning in a system that demands their deaths.
Saul Griffith, Electrify: An Optimist’s Playbook for Our Clean Energy Future: If we electrified—powered everything with electricity, generated mostly by wind, water, and sun, with some nuclear assistance—we would be able to halt global warming going forward, create lots of new jobs, and use less energy overall even with a bigger economy, even using today’s technologies. That’s the message here; unfortunately there’s no obvious political path to it.
Jordan S. Rubin, Bizarro: The Surreal Saga of America’s Secret War on Synthetic Drugs and the Florida Kingpins It Captured:In 1986, Congress passed a law, the Analogue Act, banning substances that are “substantially similar” to controlled substances. This sounds reasonable but turns out to be chemically undefined. And also the government doesn’t announce in advance which chemicals it think qualifies, which you would think would create constitutional problems but so far hasn’t. This has lead to some strange disputes, including the prosecution of some sellers of “bath salts” who worked very hard to stay within the confines of the law, up to and including giving tours to local law enforcement and the FBI. It’s a weird story and a problematic law.
Helena Hansen, Jules Netherland, and David Herzberg, Whiteout: How Racial Capitalism Changed the Color of Opioids in America: A deep dive into how whiteness kills white people along with the harm it does to Black people. Since doctors often think Black people tolerate pain more/need less pain relief, the flip side is that white pain justifies aggressive treatment. People with access to good healthcare—disproportionately white—were, doctors thought and pharmacos reinforced, not vulnerable to addiction. Relatedly, if one believes that white people are intellectually and morally stronger, it follows that they don’t need consumer protection law to prevent pharmaco exploitation. (Still, white people benefited from access to drugs that, whatever their dangers, were still safer than those from illegal markets, and they had “access to a wider and more effective range of political responses” when things went bad.)
One of the most striking parts of the book is its histories of the several different times in American history that there has been a “new” drug epidemic to which white people are reportedly newly vulnerable; the institutional forgetting of white problems coincides with the institutional suppression of Black success. (Another striking part is that one of the authors is a former addict who got help through and after his addiction: “I seemed to get only approval and respect from people who might have looked differently on an ‘addict,’ a single parent, or a welfare recipient who had been a person of color (and/or a woman). The system of Whiteness equipped them with the tools necessary to recognize that I was trying, and even though I was not succeeding, they wanted to support me.” In legislative work, good white victims convinced lawmakers to allow medical marijuana to certain pain patients, but only in a way that was likely to screen out poor and minority sufferers; they took what they could get even while recognizing the unfairness.)
In search of profits, opioid sellers constructed the good, implicitly (and often in advertising) white pain patient, who could be trusted with high doses, in contrast to the bad, implicitly nonwhite, addict. They targeted white neighborhoods for advertising and promotion, and used words like “legitimate” and “trustworthy” to describe the patients for whom pain control was a priority.
Then, when another opioid epidemic resulted, white policymakers were willing to listen to the pleas of parents and neighbors and treat white addicts as people with brain diseases in need of medical treatment—vulnerable rather than immoral. A parallel narrative, that white people were dying “deaths of despair” from alcohol, opioids, and guns, conflicted some with the addiction as brain disease narrative, but they were unified by whiteness. “On one hand, in addition to gesturing toward a nostalgia for an American industrial past in which the white working class shared the fruits of the racial hierarchy with white elites, the fact that ‘deaths of despair’ were visible among white but not Black opioid users signaled that despair was a racially coded way of humanizing addiction, of placing blame for addiction outside the affected individual.” Meanwhile, the brain disease model abstracted away from social difference and structural inequality, glossing over different responses by physicians, policymakers, and police to different addicts.
Methadone clinics are generally located in poor minority neighborhoods; often force patients to take the medicine in front of staff; and not prescribed in a way that lets people pick up a prescription on a regular basis. By contrast, buprenorphine was made available in private doctors’ offices as methadone wasn’t, available to mostly white patients, in privacy and dignity. Buprenorphine was supposedly “uniquely appropriate for a new kind of opioid user, as opposed to methadone, ‘which tends to concentrate in urban areas, [and] is a poor fit for the suburban spread of narcotic addiction.’” That last bit is a direct quote from the director of a federal agency, as if methadone were a naturally occurring phenomenon like heat sinks! Donna Shalala said buprenorphine would serve “a new kind of addict,” “including citizens who would not normally be associated with the term addiction.” One striking example: While public-sector doctors in other NYC boroughs regularly called the poor, mostly Black and Latinx addicts they saw as “med seeking” etc., Staten Island community doctors described their addicted patients as “professionals, neighbors, and innocent youth—people with whom they identified, and for whom they were willing to undergo additional training…. [One said:] ‘These are smart, Irish American kids. They’re smart and know right from wrong, and they didn’t think they were doing anything wrong. The substance affects judgment, and suddenly they start lying, cheating, stealing … without having had a criminal background.’”
But such treatment still required money, so poor white addicts didn’t get help either, since insurers often wouldn’t pay and methadone was much cheaper. US patients are over four times as likely to pay for buprenorphine with cash or private insurance as with Medicaid or Medicare. Poor people, especially incarcerated people, are more likely to be treated with no-drug regimens that treat maintenance medication as a failing. And buprenorphine was supposedly better for “stable” and “reliable” patients, which basically means not poor. Likewise, buprenorphine “was the first and only prescription medication to come with … special training and certification requirements, as well as limits on patient caseloads. Pharmaceutical executives and drug policy makers … acknowledged that white middle-class patients were the usual market segment for newly approved medications because they could afford the higher prices … and had access to prescribers. [The prescribing restrictions] helped reassure federal regulators whose ideas about who was at risk for diversion, street sale, and nonmedical use of buprenorphine were influenced by stereotypes about the propensity of Black and Latinx people toward addiction and drug trafficking.”
By contrast, in France, the same drug was billed as a public health measure against overdose and HIV among “low-income, largely immigrant and nonwhite heroin injectors,” and the opioid overdose rate dropped 80% in five years after its approval. In the US, opioid overdoses were five times higher in 2020 than in 2002, when buprenorphine was approved. Obviously, there are differences—the peak of overdose death in France, in 1995, was 565 total (out of 60 million people). But of course many of those differences, like the presence of universal healthcare, connect tightly to race (and even the ban on advertising drugs directly to consumers, which most of the world shares with France, has some connection insofar as whiteness and individualism/blaming victims and not fraudsters are linked).
Saul Griffith, Electrify: An Optimist’s Playbook for Our Clean Energy Future: If we electrified—powered everything with electricity, generated mostly by wind, water, and sun, with some nuclear assistance—we would be able to halt global warming going forward, create lots of new jobs, and use less energy overall even with a bigger economy, even using today’s technologies. That’s the message here; unfortunately there’s no obvious political path to it.
Jordan S. Rubin, Bizarro: The Surreal Saga of America’s Secret War on Synthetic Drugs and the Florida Kingpins It Captured:In 1986, Congress passed a law, the Analogue Act, banning substances that are “substantially similar” to controlled substances. This sounds reasonable but turns out to be chemically undefined. And also the government doesn’t announce in advance which chemicals it think qualifies, which you would think would create constitutional problems but so far hasn’t. This has lead to some strange disputes, including the prosecution of some sellers of “bath salts” who worked very hard to stay within the confines of the law, up to and including giving tours to local law enforcement and the FBI. It’s a weird story and a problematic law.
Helena Hansen, Jules Netherland, and David Herzberg, Whiteout: How Racial Capitalism Changed the Color of Opioids in America: A deep dive into how whiteness kills white people along with the harm it does to Black people. Since doctors often think Black people tolerate pain more/need less pain relief, the flip side is that white pain justifies aggressive treatment. People with access to good healthcare—disproportionately white—were, doctors thought and pharmacos reinforced, not vulnerable to addiction. Relatedly, if one believes that white people are intellectually and morally stronger, it follows that they don’t need consumer protection law to prevent pharmaco exploitation. (Still, white people benefited from access to drugs that, whatever their dangers, were still safer than those from illegal markets, and they had “access to a wider and more effective range of political responses” when things went bad.)
One of the most striking parts of the book is its histories of the several different times in American history that there has been a “new” drug epidemic to which white people are reportedly newly vulnerable; the institutional forgetting of white problems coincides with the institutional suppression of Black success. (Another striking part is that one of the authors is a former addict who got help through and after his addiction: “I seemed to get only approval and respect from people who might have looked differently on an ‘addict,’ a single parent, or a welfare recipient who had been a person of color (and/or a woman). The system of Whiteness equipped them with the tools necessary to recognize that I was trying, and even though I was not succeeding, they wanted to support me.” In legislative work, good white victims convinced lawmakers to allow medical marijuana to certain pain patients, but only in a way that was likely to screen out poor and minority sufferers; they took what they could get even while recognizing the unfairness.)
In search of profits, opioid sellers constructed the good, implicitly (and often in advertising) white pain patient, who could be trusted with high doses, in contrast to the bad, implicitly nonwhite, addict. They targeted white neighborhoods for advertising and promotion, and used words like “legitimate” and “trustworthy” to describe the patients for whom pain control was a priority.
Then, when another opioid epidemic resulted, white policymakers were willing to listen to the pleas of parents and neighbors and treat white addicts as people with brain diseases in need of medical treatment—vulnerable rather than immoral. A parallel narrative, that white people were dying “deaths of despair” from alcohol, opioids, and guns, conflicted some with the addiction as brain disease narrative, but they were unified by whiteness. “On one hand, in addition to gesturing toward a nostalgia for an American industrial past in which the white working class shared the fruits of the racial hierarchy with white elites, the fact that ‘deaths of despair’ were visible among white but not Black opioid users signaled that despair was a racially coded way of humanizing addiction, of placing blame for addiction outside the affected individual.” Meanwhile, the brain disease model abstracted away from social difference and structural inequality, glossing over different responses by physicians, policymakers, and police to different addicts.
Methadone clinics are generally located in poor minority neighborhoods; often force patients to take the medicine in front of staff; and not prescribed in a way that lets people pick up a prescription on a regular basis. By contrast, buprenorphine was made available in private doctors’ offices as methadone wasn’t, available to mostly white patients, in privacy and dignity. Buprenorphine was supposedly “uniquely appropriate for a new kind of opioid user, as opposed to methadone, ‘which tends to concentrate in urban areas, [and] is a poor fit for the suburban spread of narcotic addiction.’” That last bit is a direct quote from the director of a federal agency, as if methadone were a naturally occurring phenomenon like heat sinks! Donna Shalala said buprenorphine would serve “a new kind of addict,” “including citizens who would not normally be associated with the term addiction.” One striking example: While public-sector doctors in other NYC boroughs regularly called the poor, mostly Black and Latinx addicts they saw as “med seeking” etc., Staten Island community doctors described their addicted patients as “professionals, neighbors, and innocent youth—people with whom they identified, and for whom they were willing to undergo additional training…. [One said:] ‘These are smart, Irish American kids. They’re smart and know right from wrong, and they didn’t think they were doing anything wrong. The substance affects judgment, and suddenly they start lying, cheating, stealing … without having had a criminal background.’”
But such treatment still required money, so poor white addicts didn’t get help either, since insurers often wouldn’t pay and methadone was much cheaper. US patients are over four times as likely to pay for buprenorphine with cash or private insurance as with Medicaid or Medicare. Poor people, especially incarcerated people, are more likely to be treated with no-drug regimens that treat maintenance medication as a failing. And buprenorphine was supposedly better for “stable” and “reliable” patients, which basically means not poor. Likewise, buprenorphine “was the first and only prescription medication to come with … special training and certification requirements, as well as limits on patient caseloads. Pharmaceutical executives and drug policy makers … acknowledged that white middle-class patients were the usual market segment for newly approved medications because they could afford the higher prices … and had access to prescribers. [The prescribing restrictions] helped reassure federal regulators whose ideas about who was at risk for diversion, street sale, and nonmedical use of buprenorphine were influenced by stereotypes about the propensity of Black and Latinx people toward addiction and drug trafficking.”
By contrast, in France, the same drug was billed as a public health measure against overdose and HIV among “low-income, largely immigrant and nonwhite heroin injectors,” and the opioid overdose rate dropped 80% in five years after its approval. In the US, opioid overdoses were five times higher in 2020 than in 2002, when buprenorphine was approved. Obviously, there are differences—the peak of overdose death in France, in 1995, was 565 total (out of 60 million people). But of course many of those differences, like the presence of universal healthcare, connect tightly to race (and even the ban on advertising drugs directly to consumers, which most of the world shares with France, has some connection insofar as whiteness and individualism/blaming victims and not fraudsters are linked).
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Wowwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwww imagine saying something like that out loud and not thinking 'oh god, what just came out of my mouth??'
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the meaning of living when your death is society's demand
first, and thought "Oh, this will be a book about being Disabled/Chronically ill"
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