Forum X (Spring 2019)
Racist Logic
Lead essayist Donna Murch writes that, “historically, the division between ‘dope’ and medicine was the race and class of users.” By using the concept of “racial capitalism” to examine the opioid crisis alongside the War on Drugs, Murch brings an otherwise familiar story into new territory. To understand the twisted logic that created the divergent responses to drug use—succor and sympathy for white users, prison and expulsion for people of color—Murch shows how a racialized regime of drug prohibitions led Purdue Pharma to market OxyContin specifically to whites.
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CONTENTS
Editors' Note
Deborah Chasman and Joshua Cohen
FORUM
How Race Made the Opioid Crisis
Donna Murch
Race and the First Opium Crisis
Max Mishler
Black Drugs, White Drugs
Britt Rusert
The Cure Amplifies the Problem
Helena Hansen, Julie Netherland, and David Herzberg
No Gentler War on Drugs
Michael Collins
The Supremacy of Toughness
Julilly Kohler-Hausmann
Denying Racism
Jonathan Kahn
From Absolution to Accountability
L.A. Kauffman
Public Policy Made Americans the Biggest Consumers of Opioids in the World
Donna Murch
ESSAYS
Bankers and Empire: How Wall Street Colonized the Caribbean
Peter James Hudson
Branded
Jordanna Matlon
Reproducing Racial Capitalism
Alys Eve Weinbaum
Succeeding While Black
Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor
Democratizing Elitism
Richard Thompson Ford
