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Title: The Opioid Crisis Author: CrimethInc. Date: October 9, 2017 Language: en Topics: drugs, racism, white supremacy Source: Retrieved on 23rd April 2021 from https://crimethinc.com/2017/10/09/the-opioid-crisis-how-white-despair-poses-a-threat-to-people-of-color
In dominant American discourse, white people are always the
protagonists. Their problems and dilemmas, pleasures and pain, are
treated as everyone’s primary concern. Even if you are not included in
this narrative, you’re forced to reckon with it. While we anarchists
would like to see a world in which no character is a caricature, in
which people are not divided by race and only take delight in our
differences, we are all currently obliged to pay attention to the
problems of white people because, in their pain, they frequently lash
out at those they perceive as their enemies. The opioid crisis is a
prime example.
In an interview on National Public Radio, author Margaret Talbot
describes a scene she witnessed at a softball practice in West Virginia:
“There were a bunch of middle school-age girls sitting on the ground
comforting each other and crying, there were two little kids running
around crying and screaming, and there were a lot of adults trying to
help them and escort them away from the scene because two parents who
had come to their daughter’s practice, a man and a woman, had both
overdosed simultaneously and were lying on the field about six feet
apart and in obvious need of resuscitation. Their two little younger
children who had come with them were trying to get them to wake up. So
Michael and his colleague were able to revive the parents using Narcan,
which is the antidote to opioid overdoses—reverses them. But as is
increasingly the case, it took several doses to revive them because they
had probably had heroin that was cut with something stronger, possibly
fentanyl. And so this was the scene that was witnessed by many people in
this community who were at this softball practice on an afternoon in
March.”
Some of those adult witnesses, Talbot says, were encouraging the EMTs to
let the parents die. This inhumanity is shocking; it’s no mystery why
people like the ones in this story are trying to get high. Few people
feel like their lives are worth much these days; constant low-level
stress over money, family, relationships, social disorder, health, and
work are features of everyone’s lives. When you’re poor, and perhaps
socially isolated, those things compound. Poverty is only occasionally
dramatic or joyful; mostly, it’s crushingly boring and stressful. If you
are prescribed pain medication because of an injury or chronic pain, the
euphoria and floating freedom may be the best you’ve felt in years. This
is how most people now start their opioid addictions.
In the 1990s, US doctors were reconsidering their beliefs about pain.
Recognizing the toll that constant, low-level pain can take on the
body—much like the effect of poverty upon the spirit—doctors began to
prescribe pain medication more freely, believing that being free from
pain might speed recovery, as well as being a boon in itself.
Pharmaceutical companies told doctors that their latest pain medications
were not likely to be addictive.
This claim is true for some—some people can take opioids for a couple of
days after surgery and then switch to over-the-counter medicines without
a hitch. But opioids hit other people’s brains differently: they
experience intense pleasure and comfort, and after a couple of weeks of
ease, going off the medication can feel unbearably bleak. So people kept
going back for more—and, eventually, word began to circulate about which
doctors would freely prescribe pain medications. Some of these offices
were the frequently-exposéd, cynically-motivated “pill farms”; others
just trusted their patients. Pain is pain, the doctors reasoned, and
addiction is not a sin; is it really so bad to prescribe people what
they need to feel OK in the world? What is the line between Adderall and
speed, Oxycontin and heroin? Only legitimacy. For people who were not
comfortable thinking of themselves as criminals, it felt more possible
to exaggerate to a doctor than to buy heroin on the corner.
As word spread about the accessibility of these opioid pills, heroin
dealers saw their market slipping away. Cartels in Mexico, Guatemala,
and other countries took notice, and started producing heroin so pure
that it could be cut much more, producing a larger amount of product
that could be sold for less. They also began cutting it with different
chemicals, which made it far more potent and potentially deadly; and, of
course, cutting heroin to sell on the black market is not an exact
science.
When the government finally started tightening regulations for
prescribing opioids and raiding pill farms, millions of addicts were
left desperate, and turned at last to explicitly illegal drugs, which
were now more affordable than ever—and far more dangerous. While rates
of opioid and heroin addiction are not actually higher than they used to
be, the rate of people dying from overdoses has skyrocketed. The doses
people are used to taking may be five times as potent as before. Surely
no one wants to get high at their kids’ soccer practice: what they want
is to feel normal rather than ravenous for a fix, able to cheer their
kids on, so they fix a hit before they arrive… but sometimes, instead of
enabling them to function, the medicine knocks them out.
It’s obvious that this crisis is receiving very different coverage than
the crack epidemic of the 1990s or the heroin epidemic that preceded it
in black communities. Those waves of drug use became a pretext for mass
incarceration, mandatory minimums, three-strikes laws, permissible
racial profiling, and militarized schools, all of which put a
disproportionately black and brown population in prison, disenfranchised
of voting rights and unable to find legal work once they emerge. These
ex-prisoners are therefore unable to exert even the slightest leverage
on the government policies that incarcerated them via the traditional
political means of voting, lobbying, and cutting deals. They are likely
to be forced to break the law to survive, which may mean they return to
prison.
A cynical person might speculate that it’s no coincidence drug laws are
being reformed precisely when white people are experiencing this crisis.
White people have always used drugs, of course, but it has only recently
been considered a major problem. Although 33,000 people died from
overdosing in 2015, there does not seem to be a corresponding wave of
repression directed at that population. The liberal affect about the
epidemic is one of intense sadness and loss, as though they are
surveying the damage left by a hurricane—something beyond anyone’s
control. Conservatives, as usual, have plenty of judgment to offer:
users are depicted as trailer trash, judged for the very poverty that
may have driven them to use. But there’s often a second note of anger:
both impoverished white community members and the politicians they elect
are looking for someone else to blame.
It’s no surprise who the scapegoat is. Black and brown people are always
blamed for white despair. The same old tired narratives are trotted out:
these drugs are coming from south of the border; they’re taking our
jobs; their civil unrest is wrecking our communities. White people
reminisce about when their towns used to have industry—jobs for
lower-class people that supposedly promised a possible way out of
poverty or at least allowed them to remain poor in a stable sort of way.
Few white people, however, have turned towards radical politics in
response to deindustrialization; most of the predominantly white
communities that benefit from Medicaid expansion drug treatment still
voted for Trump, who promised to repeal Obamacare. This is not entirely
bad news, as it suggests people cannot be easily satisfied—they want
something wholly different, not just harm reduction—but it is disturbing
in light of how Trump’s presidency is likely to continue to affect black
and brown people.
All this feels depressingly routine for anyone who has been paying
attention to the dominant arc of US history. Ironically, far from being
responsible for the problem, many of the migrants coming to the US are
fleeing the violence of the cartels responsible for producing these
drugs, which are funded by the US citizens who consume their wares, not
by the Mexican and Central American migrants fleeing their zones of
control.
Many black people in the 1970s and ’80s fought against police harassment
and for black self-determination and community involvement in drug user
recovery—and sometimes, unfortunately, for heavier legal penalties and
increased police harassment of predominantly black drug users. In
contrast, many white people seem less eager to take responsibility or
demand change along those lines. Self-declared sons of white America
feel robbed of their birthright, and they want it back from their black,
brown, immigrant, and off-shore brothers… never considering that it
could be their own parents who are to blame. Some whites acknowledge
that reforming their own behavior is part of the solution to their
social problems, but many—such as the Proud Boys—aim to do so only in
order to glorify and renew the misogynist, racist foundations of
“Western civilization.”
This is ironic, in that these same racialized divisions are also
responsible for preventing white workers from making common cause with
others to stand up for themselves against the causes of their suffering.
Deindustrialization is hitting white communities now the same way that
it hit black communities in the 1980s, bringing with it the addiction
and despair long familiar to more targeted groups. While fascists seek
to attribute responsibility for the suffering of poor white people to
people of color or some sort of Jewish conspiracy, the fundamental
problem is obviously capitalism. Market imperatives make dealers and
cartels seek profit at any cost, just as they reward industrial
corporations that shift their production facilities offshore or replace
human employees with machines. It is capitalism that has broken up our
communities, compelling us to chase jobs from one place to another
across the continent while extractive corporations decimate the natural
world we depend on for survival. To defend ourselves against this
onslaught, we have to come together across all lines of identity,
identifying with each other even across gulfs of privilege and fighting
to abolish privilege and capitalism entirely. One of the chief reasons
race was invented in the first place was to split the interests of those
on the receiving end of all the disparities and misfortunes imposed by
capitalism.
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But what do we do about addiction itself? In his book, In The Realm of
Hungry Ghosts, Dr. Gabor Mate reviews studies performed on rats that
illumine an alternative solution to the dilemmas of white America. Mate
describes how researchers addicted rats to cocaine. Predictably, the
rats came back for more cocaine regularly, even feverishly. But when the
rats were removed from solitary, clinical surroundings and put in a
natural environment in which they could find each other and engage in
more interesting activity, the rats, though already addicted, were much
less interested in cocaine than in the rest of their lives.
People are not rats, and cocaine is not an opiate, but the implications
are clear enough. To put an end to the problem of harmful addictions in
our society, we have to make our world livable. This is also a way to
understand the anarchist project.
As anarchists, we aspire to fight the causes of unhappiness and poverty,
to counter the strategies that our oppressors employ to drain us of
emotional and material resources that could be employed outside their
marketplace. We aim to interrupt the destruction of our world and our
relationships and our ability to share. If we love people who are
suffering from drug addiction, regardless of their race, we must make
the world a more livable place. Let’s create a world no one would want
to escape, in which the idea of a drug that would make us feel less
alive—or a cellphone or a video game or any other product—is
self-evidently undesirable.
This means maintaining cooperative projects to support those fighting to
free themselves of addiction—even Alcoholics Anonymous was founded by
people reading the anarchist Peter Kropotkin to learn about how groups
based in horizontal organizing and mutual aid could address their own
needs together. But it also means attacking the foundations of authority
in this society. When we fight against the power that capitalism and the
state currently possess to determine all the possibilities of our lives,
we are also fighting against the causes of addiction, racism, and
despair.
Part of this undertaking is refusing to let white people blame other
broke people for their difficulties. We have to show clearly who the
enemy is and create avenues for finding affinity and solidarity across
racial lines while demonstrating the kind of activity that it will take
to solve our shared problems. We must refuse to sanction scapegoating,
yet simultaneously resist the urge to treat groups of people as
monsters—even those who scapegoat. The divisions that racism imposes in
our communities are responsible for much of the suffering that white
people experience, too—everyone has a stake in abolishing white
supremacy as well as the institutions that depend on it to maintain
their sway. We must introduce an anarchist tension into all these
ongoing struggles for survival.
When we imagine this task on a global scale, it appears almost
impossible. Fortunately, we encounter it broken up into smaller steps
every single day.