David Herzberg. White Market Drugs

In twentieth-century America, two seemingly contradictory drug crises became increasingly visible. The first was an unprecedented rise in opioid addiction, devastating rural White areas including Appalachia and certain parts of the Midwest. The second was a stark increase in incarceration, disproportionately amongst racial minorities, creating a crisis termed the “new Jim Crow.” Herzberg begins his impeccably researched and argued book at this starting point and sets out to examine the historical trajectory of these two crises, which are, he explains, flip sides of the same racist coin. His sophisticated analysis draws on a number of useful constructs that serve as the interpretative scaffolding for the entire book. The first is his distinction between white markets and informal markets. White markets are defined as the “legally and medically approved social institutions within which the vast majority of American experiences with psychoactive drugs and addiction have taken place” (p. 2). Outside of...

Addiction · Appalachia · Criminology · Opioid · Opioid addiction · Political science · Psychiatry · Sociology · White (mutation) · Diverse Historical and Scientific Studies · Historical Studies and Socio-cultural Analysis · History · History of Science and Medicine · Medicine

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