America Treated Addiction as Medical Problem – Until People of Color Were Addicted
Experts decry systemic racism in the treatment of opioid addiction. More Black patients have to line up to get methadone. White Americans are more likely to get buprenorphine prescribed from the privacy of a doctor’s office.
By Chris Adams, National Press Foundation
U.S. laws have often been passed in response to substance use by specific racial or ethnic groups. In the 1870s, one of the first laws against drug use in the United States was an ordinance passed in San Francisco to ban the smoking of opium in opium dens – then prevalent in Chinese immigrant neighborhoods. In the early 1900s, cocaine use by Black people triggered national anti-drug legislation. In the 1930s, marijuana use by Mexican immigrants led to states outlawing that drug. While white Americans had also used these drugs, it wasn’t until they were associated with non-white populations that the law was brought to bear. “History itself demonstrates that there is a direct line between how we criminalize addiction and then how that loop results in a racialization of substance use,” said Dr. Jessica Isom, a clinical instructor in psychiatry at the Yale School of Medicine.
The “War on Drugs” levied harsher penalties on people of color. Prison sentences for use of crack cocaine prevalent in Black neighborhood were heavier than for use of powder cocaine favored by whites. The disparity had its roots in the drug policies of the Nixon administration – as Nixon’s domestic policy adviser John Ehrlichman admitted to an author in the 1990s: “The Nixon campaign in 1968, and the Nixon White House after that, had two enemies: the antiwar left and black people. You understand what I’m saying? We knew we couldn’t make it illegal to be either against the war or black, but by getting the public to associate the hippies with marijuana and blacks with heroin, and then criminalizing both heavily, we could disrupt those communities. We could arrest their leaders, raid their homes, break up their meetings, and vilify them night after night on the evening news. Did we know we were lying about the drugs? Of course we did.”
One in 5 incarcerated people is imprisoned for a drug offense. Whites are underrepresented, while Blacks, Latinos and Native Americans are overrepresented. But Black people, Latinos and whites each have illicit drug use rates of about 10%. Isom said that on any given day, 450,000 people are incarcerated for nonviolent drug offenses. Isom called for a shift from criminalization to medicalization of drug treatment.
Speaker: Dr. Jessica Isom, Clinical Instructor, Psychiatry, Yale School of Medicine
This program is sponsored by the American Society of Addiction Medicine, with support from Arnold Ventures. NPF retains sole responsibility for programming and content.
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