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.