drug use

The December 2016 issue of Culture, Medicine & Psychiatry is now available here. In this series of article highlights, we will explore publications included in the latest issue. This week, we present a highlight on Julie Netherland and Helena B. Hansen’s “The War on Drugs That Wasn’t: Wasted Whiteness, ‘Dirty Doctors,’ and Race in Media Coverage
of Prescription Opioid Misuse.” The article is accessible in full here.

The authors open their discussion by remarking that the media in the United States has increasingly honed in on heroin and opioid use and misuse by white individuals, particularly featuring stories like that of actor Philip Seymour Hoffman. However, throughout these articles, race is typically not mentioned in conjunction with white opioid users. At the same time, the media has historically depicted drug users as “black and brown,” and demonized these individuals as criminals whose drug use behaviors should be heavily policed.

Thus, the authors assert that there is a “narcotic apartheid” in the media, in which white drug users are insulated from the racist narratives that are attached to opioid misuse amongst non-white individuals. Coded language is typically used to delineate users by race: for instance, using “suburban” or “rural” to refer to white opioid users versus “urban” to indicate non-white users. Classist undertones also shape these narratives, as rural methamphetamine users are derided as ‘hillbillies’ who threaten the moralized order of “whiteness” as suburban and middle class. The type of drugs themselves have taken on racist and classist meanings, such that prescription drug misuse (often ascribed to wealthier, white individuals) is under-prosecuted compared to the use of methamphetamine (poorer, white individuals) and crack cocaine (people of color.)

Despite this, the authors state, it is the racist narrative that remains most prominent in media accounts. Through systematic coding and analysis, Netherland and Hansen found that middle-class white drug users are almost universally characterized in news stories as having “wasted” potential and being “victims” of a challenging climate of drug misuse. They also discovered that stories about drug misuse amongst people of color was not viewed as “newsworthy.” When it was reported, articles focused largely on arrests made or on convictions of drug-related crimes, or on the networks that linked drugs from black and Latina communities to white individuals in the suburbs. In the stories of white opioid users, the articles shifted blame away from the individuals, suggesting they did not ‘intend’ to become addicted. When discussing how to address white drug misuse, the articles most frequently turned to physicians’ prescription practices and the threat of over-prescription. Thus, the solution proposed entails greater regulation of prescription habits: again, beyond the level of the individual user.

Articles on opioid use amongst predominantly non-white, “urban” populations overwhelmingly suggested increased “criminal justice involvement” as the most appropriate response. These articles tended not to craft the stories of non-white opioid users as tragic or accidental. This centralized blame for addiction on non-white opioid users, whereas as noted before, white opioid users tended not to be blamed for their behavior. Further deepening these racist undertones was that the “dirty doctors” (those willing to prescribe opioids to predominantly white patients) reported on in the news were often themselves people of color or immigrants.

The authors conclude that characterizations of opioid news articles as “color-blind” due to the inclusion of stories on white users is misleading. While they agree that the representations of white opioid users demonstrates the impact of drug misuse across racial boundaries, there remains coded language that systematically disparages and marginalizes people of color who use these substances. Netherland and Hansen state that “in short, the problem of race and opioids cannot stop with expansion of access to treatment. Clinicians and health advocates have to address institutional racism, as reflected in media coverage of inner city heroin use versus the prescription opioid epidemic, if they want to dismantle racial exclusions in drug interventions” (page 680.)

In addition to our From the Archive series, where we highlight past articles in the journal’s history, the CMP blog features selected previews of our latest issue. This week, we again take a sneak peek into an article from the March issue: the first installment of 2015’s Volume 39 of Culture, Medicine & Psychiatry.

Heroin: From Drug to Ambivalent Medicine

On the Introduction of Medically Prescribed Heroin and the Emergence of a New Space for Treatment

Birgitte Schepelern Johansen • Katrine Schepelern Johansen. Pages 75-91. Link to article: http://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s11013-014-9406-7

This article examines the reintroduction of heroin as a medicine, as opposed to illicit drug, in the treatment of substance abuse patients. Unlike existing research on this topic, the authors here emphasize the exchanges between the users, the staff, and the material space of the implementation of heroin: the built and organizational environments of the clinic, rather than just the actors in this space alone.

Heroin exists in a complicated place in these clinics: it is (paradoxically) utilized to minimize addiction to it. Rather than marginalizing the drug, this process of managed heroin prescription lends the drug a central place in the lives of users and staff, albeit a place that ambivalently lies between drug use as pleasure and drug injection as a form of medicalized control.

When considering the rooms in the clinic where the staff injects heroin into clients, the authors note that the space is strictly regulated. Staff observe incoming clients, while those who carry out injections do not permit the patients from selecting where the drug is administered. Likewise, this clinical space is not used for socializing: clients don’t casually talk while waiting, and typically depart this area and linger in the facility’s more casual cafe after receiving their injection. The clinical space removes the use of heroin from the context of pleasure-seeking, and assumes control for the drug’s use. Although the substance is the same, heroin users’ experiences of the drug in recreational settings is deliberately set apart from its use in the clinic.

Yet distinguishing the clinical space where heroin is injected, while no doubt increasing medicalized control over the substance, also complicates the notion of the drug as unquestionably destructive. Clients move into a social, casual environment in the cafe after initial injection. Even the clinical space itself underscores the intimacy of intravenous drug use, as staff and clients engage one-on-one during the injections. The staff similarly struggle with the complex nature of heroin as an illegal drug, made most evident by the strict safeguarding of the location where heroin is stored.

Although the medicalization of heroin abuse may serve to diminish the criminal stigma surrounding use of the drug, medical models of treatment remain entangled in older ideas of substance illegality, criminality, and the stringent enforcement of substance abuse policies. Conversely, the clinical treatment space and its organization is arranged in such a way that muddies the boundary between pleasure and treatment. The authors thereby illustrate the complexity of moving towards a medical model of heroin treatment, and how notions of control evolve with the changing landscape of substance abuse policy.