Redpilling: A professional reflects on white racial privilege and drug policy in American health care

ABSTRACT

The landscape of American health care is changing under the weight of new knowledge that health care workers—physicians, nurses, and so on—are abusing the drugs that they use within health care. In this article, the author uses ethnographic data (including his own work in American pharmacies over the past two decades) to contextualize how health care’s drug abuse epidemic is racially coded to ignore the fact that White Americans are the primary drug abusers—what he calls “redpilling.” In pointing out the racial contexts of health care’s drug abuse, the author asks whether our national “war on drugs” ought to be recast to see how White racial privilege—the privilege of White Americans to comfortably perform certain actions (and get away with them if they are illegal or morally wrong)—mandates that we move the lens of drug policy from ghettos and ethnic communities to American health care where we have been historically positioned to not identify White American health care workers who work while high.

KEYWORDS:

• Addiction
• anthropology
• healthcare
• policy
• race

Notes

Bourgois mentions the drug “Vicodin,” which is a pharmaceutical drug, 196 pages into his text.

“Consumer-patient” is my term for a person who is simultaneously a biomedical subject and a purchaser of goods.

As far I can tell, the term diversion is used in the sense that I am using it in a JAMA article from May 23, 1966, titled “Size and Extent of the Problem.” The author, Joseph Sadusk (1996), a medical doctor, describes “distribution diversion.” He states that “an accurate and specific description of the size and extent of nonnarcotic (pharmaceutically manufactured drugs) addiction is a most difficult matter since the drugs are obtained through illicit traffic which cannot be controlled under the present law.” He later continues that “our power to determine the quantities of these drugs produced and the channels of distribution in the United States is limited under the existing law because our field inspectors cannot make an across-the-board inspection of the records of the companies that produce the drugs. However, we do have facts which show that the production and distribution of these drugs in illicit channels is a problem.”