An interview with anthropologist and psychiatrist Helena Hansen unpacks racial disparities in drug addiction portrayals and treatments.
Public health officials say opioid use and related deaths have reached a crisis point in the U.S. An interview with anthropologist and psychiatrist Helena Hansen unpacks the racial disparities in how drug addiction is interpreted, portrayed, and treated., with medical professionals prescribing higher rates of opioids, a class of pain-relieving drugs with addictive qualities. Since 2013, overdose rates have spiked with wider access to powerful synthetic opioids, especially fentanyl.
The first, which is often applied to Black and Brown drug users, is incredibly racialized and moralistic. It suggests people who use drugs suffer from, this way has been overwhelmingly associated with affluent, white housewives who went to doctors for medications to treat conditions such asIn the 1990s, the growing field of genetics expanded diagnostic understandings of disease.
I also grew up with a structural analysis of homelessness and mass incarceration. As a child, after California drastically cut mental health funding, I noticed the streets filling up with people released from the, many ended up in Bay Area parks. On the way to the bus stop, I would have to step over or run past anyone who seemed “scary.