The Dig is a podcast produced in conjunction with Jacobin Magazine, and yes, Jacobin is a print publication,

not just a place for online commentary, but long-form, serious print journalism and socialist analysis.

The magazine is released quarterly and runs around 160 pages filled with award-winning design and the ideas that movements need to thrive.

Dig listeners can join more than 70,000 Jacobin subscribers supporting this vital work for just $15 a year.

$15 gets you an entire year of Jacobin in print and access to the magazine's very extensive archive.

I've got on a sneak peek at their new issue on conspiracy theories out in May and I highly recommend that you check it out.

First time subscribers only, you can access this deal by going to bit.ly slash dig Jacobin. That's bit.ly slash dig Jacobin.

Welcome to the Dig, a podcast from Jacobin Magazine. My name is Daniel Denver and I'm broadcasting from Providence, Rhode Island.

A decade ago, the news was dominated by the opioid crisis, escalating waves of fatal overdoses, first from prescription oxycontin, then from heroin, followed by extraordinarily powerful fentanyl.

It was, the discourse went, a new face of addiction, that face being a white and often middle-class one.

But in reality, this was the third medical addiction crisis to hit white middle-class Americans.

My interview today is on the book White Out, how racial capitalism changed the color of opioids in America, with its authors Helena Hansen, Jewels Netherlands, and David Hertzberg.

What they show is that it was American capitalism and its illusory promises of whiteness, that not only decisively shaped this reaction to the opioid crisis, but that actually made the opioid crisis in the first place.

And at all, they write, quote, drew on a century-old system of narcotic segregation in the US, in which some drugs become illegal through association with non-white users.

And other drugs are legal and are deemed medicines, reserved for white and middle-class consumers.

In short, a system in which the whiteness of certain drugs medicalizes them.

That system has rendered poor people vulnerable to criminalization, incarceration, and second-class medical care.

While, at the same time, ironically and horribly, leaving white middle-class people whose whiteness and class status was supposed to protect them from addiction wide open to this prescription drug crisis.

Today, overdose deaths are at record levels, but increasingly, it is black people dying these days, and the crisis has receded from the headlines.

That so-called new, white, more sympathetically portrayed face of the opioid crisis did create the political space to advance progressive harm reduction measures.

But that window may be closing, and the overall punishing and lethal logic of the drug war remains in place, and keeps incentivizing cartels to turn to more potent, and thus more compact and lucrative drugs like fentanyl.

Indeed, even in the case of the medical treatment for opioid addiction, it wasn't just that the sympathetic image of white addiction created space for a more harm reduction-oriented approach.

...