About the Book
The first critical analysis of how Whiteness drove the opioid crisis.
In the past two decades, media images of the surprisingly white “new face” of the US opioid crisis abounded. But why was the crisis so white? Some argued that skyrocketing overdoses were “deaths of despair” signaling deeper socioeconomic anguish in white communities. Whiteout makes the counterintuitive case that the opioid crisis was the product of white racial privilege as well as despair.
Anchored by interviews, data, and riveting firsthand narratives from three leading experts—an addiction psychiatrist, a policy advocate, and a drug historian—Whiteout reveals how a century of structural racism in drug policy, and in profit-oriented medical industries led to mass white overdose deaths. The authors implicate racially segregated health care systems, the racial assumptions of addiction scientists, and relaxed regulation of pharmaceutical marketing to white consumers. Whiteout is an unflinching account of how racial capitalism is toxic for all Americans.
Published by the University of California Press, March 2023
About The Authors
Helena Hansen
Jules Netherland
Jules Netherland
Helena Hansen, an MD, Ph.D. psychiatrist-anthropologist, is the interim chair of the Department of Psychiatry and Biobehavioral Sciences at UCLA and interim director of the UCLA Semel Institute for Neuroscience and Human Behavior at the David Geffen School of Medicine.
Jules Netherland
Jules Netherland
Jules Netherland
Julie “Jules” Netherland, PhD, is the managing director of the Department of Research and Academic Engagement at the Drug Policy Alliance. Netherland previously worked in DPA’s New York Policy Office where she was instrumental in passing New York’s first medical marijuana laws.
David Herzberg
Jules Netherland
David Herzberg
David Herzberg is Professor of History at the University at Buffalo (SUNY). He researches the history of drugs and drug policy in America with a focus on pharmaceuticals. He is the author of White Market Drugs: Big Pharma and the Hidden History of Addiction in America and Happy Pills in America: From Miltown to Prozac.
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