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

Join us in conversation with psychiatrist-anthropologist DR. HELENA HANSEN (Whiteout: How Racial Capitalism Changed the Color of Opioids in America) as she discusses how Whiteness drove the opioid crisis. Through the research and analysis of colleagues and co-authors Jules Netherland and David Herzberg (a policy advocate and a drug historian), Whiteout makes the counterintuitive case that the opioid crisis was the product of white racial privilege as well as despair. Hanson joins us in a candid conversation about how a century of structural racism in drug policy and profit-oriented medical industries led to mass overdose deaths.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

DR. HELENA HANSEN, MD, Ph.D. psychiatrist-anthropologist, is Professor & Interim Chair of Psychiatry & Biobehavioral Sciences at UCLA’s DGSOM & Interim Director of the Semel Institute for Neuroscience & Human Behavior. She is the author of three books: Addicted to Christ: Remaking Men in Puerto Rican Pentecostal Drug Ministries; Structural Competency in Medicine and Mental Health: A Case-Based Approach to Treating the Social Determinants of Health; and Whiteout: How Racial Capitalism Changed the Color of Heroin in America. She was elected to the National Academy of Medicine in 2021.

ABOUT THE HOST

HEATHER ADAMS is an associate professor of English and a cross-appointed faculty member in Women's, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at the University of North Carolina Greensboro. A rhetorical scholar, Heather's research and teaching focuses on rhetorics of shame, rhetorics of health and medicine, reproductive politics, and advocacy. Her books include Enduring Shame: A Recent History of Unwed Pregnancy and Righteous Reproduction (University of South Carolina Press, 2022) and (with Nancy Myers) Inclusive Aims: Rhetoric's Role in Reproductive Justice (Parlor Press, 2024). Heather also volunteers as a faculty partner with the NC Survivor's Union.