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Opioid Storytelling: Rehabilitating a White Disability Nationalism

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  12 April 2021

STEPHEN KNADLER Open the ORCID record for STEPHEN KNADLER [Opens in a new window]
STEPHEN KNADLER*
Affiliation:
English Department, Spelman College. Email: [email protected].
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Abstract

“Opioid Storytelling: Rehabilitating a White Disability Nationalism” argues that stories of the opioid crisis disseminate an emerging white disability nationalism that functions to morph and reconsolidate the “machinery of whiteness” around an affectively charged disability politics. Through a close reading of HBO's 2017 documentary Warning: This Drug May Kill You, directed by Perri Peltz, as well as Beth Macy's New York Times best book of 2018, Dopesick, this essay contends that opioid storytelling redeploys a panic about lost agency and increased vulnerabilities into a melancholic reinvestment in a fantasy ideal of white immunity nationalism. Opioid storytelling's “relapsed” whiteness, which invokes a long history of fears about racial degeneration, restores whiteness's category crisis by presenting middle-class whites as abled disableds, or dopesick addicts, in contrast to an unredeemable noncompliant blackness, and, in doing so, resolves the contradictions within conservative neoliberal discourses between sympathetic addicts and a simultaneous insistence on individual accountability and family values. Opioid storytelling reveals not only a contemporary morphing of a complex history of race and public health, but offers new identifications for “fragile” white subjects to reinvest in intractable hierarchies of white supremacism, while simultaneously thinking of themselves as liberal antiracists.

Type
Research Article
Information
Journal of American Studies , Volume 55 , Issue 5 , December 2021 , pp. 1098 - 1124
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Copyright
Copyright © The Author(s), 2021. Published by Cambridge University Press in association with the British Association for American Studies

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References

1 For the GOP stories of the opioid crisis see the following sites: www.gop.gov/roundups/these-are-the-stories-of-the-opioid-crisis; www.gop.gov/roundups/the-crisis-next-door.

2 Edow N. Yankah, “When Addiction Has a White Face,” New York Times, 9 Feb. 2016, at www.nytimes.com/2016/02/09/opinion/when-addiction-has-a-white-face.html.

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4 As Alexander, Kiang, and Barbieri report, drawing on a longitudinal study between 1979 and 2015, the relation between heroin mortalities and populations has undergone three waves. Prior to the mid-1990s, when Purdue Pharma launched OxyContin, the heroin epidemic impacted racial and ethnic populations equally. Starting in the late 1990s until 2010, there was a greater increase in opioid-related deaths among whites than other groups driven by synthetic opioids (such as codeine, hydrocodone, and oxycodone), but since 2010 when Big Pharma reformulated OxyContin and the introduction of prescription monitoring programs (PMPs) shut down some pill mills and stopped users’ access to painkillers, heroin overdose deaths have increased consistently across all races as users have switched to a cheaper and more available street heroin, which is often mixed with fentanyl and other potent synthetic opioids. Alexander, Monica J., Kiang, Mathew V., and Barbieri, Magali, “Trends in Black and White Opioid Mortality in the United States, 1979–2015,” Epidemiology, 29, 5 (Sept. 2018), 707–15CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed.

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17 See, for example, Scott Neuman, “Trump's ‘Drug-Infested Den’ Remark in Transcript Angers New Hampshire,” NPR, 3 Aug. 2017, at www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-way/2017/08/03/541406337/trumps-drug-infested-den-remark-angers-new-hampshire. German Lopez, “Trump's Wall Won't Do Anything about the Opioid Epidemic,” Vox, 9 Jan. 2019, at www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2019/1/8/18174768/trump-wall-opioid-epidemic-heroin.

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20 Since the mid-2010s a new genre of opioid documentary storytelling has emerged as a vehicle for representing the trauma, but also reconstructing white racial formations: MSNBC's 2017 “One Nation, Overdosed”; the Wall Street Journal's 2016 “American Epidemic: The Nation's Struggle with Opioid Addiction,” PBS Frontline's 2016 “Chasing Heroin”; Netflix's 2017 “Heroin(e)”; and the 2018 “Recovery Boys,” to name the most visible.

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22 Warning: This Drug May Kill You, dir. Perri Peltz (New York: HBO Documentary Films, 2017).

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27 In its review of Peltz's Warning, even a supposedly “scientific” magazine like Psychology Today (2017) reenforces the opioid imaginary's foundational obfuscatory blurring of the statistical fact that 80% of recent heroin addictions started with opioid painkillers to 80% of recent heroin users were prescribed opioid painkillers by their doctor. This linguistic slip from illicit use to physician-prescribed use is central to preserving whiteness's comparative non-culpability and victimization.

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37 The prominence of these parents’ stories can be seen in such autobiographies as If You Love Me: A Mother's Journey through Her Daughter's Opioid Addiction by Maureen Cavanagh (New York: Henry Holt and Company, 2018), which grew out of a 7 Jan. 2017 New York Times article, “Inside a Killer Drug Epidemic,” and in recent movies such as 2018's Ben Is Back written and directed by Peter Hedges and starring Julia Roberts.

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48 Rachel Dissell, “Ohio Construction Workers Seven Times More Likely to Die of an Opioid Overdoes in 2016,” Plain Dealer, 5 Nov. 2017, at www.cleveland.com/metro/2017/11/ohio_construction_workers_seven_times_more_likely_to_die_of_an_opioid_overdose_in_2016.html. See also Sharon O'Malley, “Construction Workers at Heightened Risk of Painkiller Abuse,” Construction Dive, 30 June 2015, at www.constructiondive.com/news/construction-workers-at-heightened-risk-of-painkiller-abuse/401491.

49 No longer allowed to unionize, no longer granted a living wage with benefits and safe working conditions, many laborers survive the unsteady employment, the tough repetitive work, the chronic pain, the strain of being often separated from their families as they travel to job sites, and the overtime pressures to finish projects by turning to opioids. Many constructions bosses even acknowledge dispensing opiates to keep workers on the job, and for longer hours (although this practice has recently come under fire in the industry).

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