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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.

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.

...