Join us for a panel discussion on Whiteout, hosted by Incite at Columbia University. Registration is required for building access. Free and open to the public.
To join in-person, select "in-person" at checkout. On the day of the event, you will recieve a building access pass to gain entry to 61 Claremont Avenue Suite 1300.
To join virtually, select "virtual" at checkout. On the day of the event, you will recieve a Zoom link.
Whiteout: How Racial Capitalism Changed the Color of Opioids in America
Winner of the New Millenium Book Award from the American Anthropological Association.
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.
For more information, visit whiteoutbook.org.
About the authors
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.
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 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.
About Incite at Columbia University
Incite is an interdisciplinary institute at Columbia University. We produce knowledge for public action. We do so by joining with people and organizations within and outside the university to rethink our understanding of what knowledge is, how it’s created, and how it can be used.
Incite's public programming is made possible through the Paul F. Lazarsfeld endowment at Columbia University.
For more information, visit incite.columbia.edu.