“Whiteout: How Racial Capitalism Changed the Color of Opioids in America”

This talk is based on over a decade of participant observation in the field of addiction medicine that has evolved in tandem with the marketing of Oxycontin. It reviews several “technologies of whiteness” – neuroscience, new biotechnology development, regulation and marketing – that explain the racial symbolism and demographics of opioid use. It ends by interrogating the magic bullet ideology underlying the biomedicalization of addiction in the era of white opioids, and offering an approach – “structural competency” – to addressing the institutional and policy drivers of the overdose crisis.

Helena Hansen, an MD, Ph.D. psychiatrist-anthropologist, is Professor and Interim Chair of Psychiatry and Interim Director of the Semel Institute for Neuroscience and Human Behavior at UCLA. She is an internationally recognized leader in social medicine, and in biosocial research that illuminates the mechanisms by which social environment drives mental health outcomes.

This event is co-sponsored by HHIVE and the Moral Economies of Medicine Carolina Seminar.

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