Here's the take-home message from the new book "Whiteout": we crack down on drugs when the victims of prohibition are minorities and we "medicalize" drugs when the victims of prohibition are white.
Here's where I'd usually tell you all the ways that the book I'm reviewing has "missed the point." But "Whiteout1" is a very rare book when it comes to drugs: one in which the authors truly have something to teach ME. I believe this all the more after listening to their discussion on YouTube (April 12, 2023). They truly "get it" about prohibition.
The deadpan Robin Kelley is not necessarily being entirely facetious when he calls "Whiteout" the best book of all time. Let's all read it -- multiple times, if possible.
My mother was a Caucasian. She became dependent on oxy after her local practitioner prescribed the drug for her anxiety. When you're white, these substances are called "medicines" you see.
Already, there's a problem here. My mom's anxiety could have been excellently treated with a wide variety of substances with no addiction potential, starting with MDMA 3 and a wide variety of other phenethylamines created by chemists like Alexander Shulgin. Then there are psychedelics and plant medicines which intoxiphobic westerners have not even dared investigate because these drugs are both illegal and highly stigmatized in superstitious America.
So the Drug War ideology of substance demonization tied the hands of her GP. If white patients like my mom complain constantly about anxiety, they have nothing effective to offer her except drugs like oxy with addiction potential.
The odd thing, however, is how such drug use is viewed by society. I personally never in the world thought of my mother as a "drug" user in the evil sense of that word. Nor did any family members. I never even thought about the specific drug that she was using. To me, it was just some medicine with which she was having issues, not a "drug" in the negative sense of that word.
Only after her decade-long bout with her anxiety "medicine" was coming to an end did I realize that the drug involved was oxy, a substance whose name was slowly becoming a term of reproach in modern parlance. She, after all, was not the kind of person who used "drugs." She was using medicine!
Of course, the problem with this viewpoint is that minorities and the poor who, for financial and systemic reasons, use drugs without state sanction are considered "druggies," even though they are basically just guilty of self-medication4. They are punished by drug law for leaving the doctor out of the loop when it comes to psychological relief.
There is something obviously racist here. Drug abuse among minorities and the poor is an excuse to lock them up in America -- whereas drug abuse among elderly middle-class white American females is a medical matter worthy of our concern and empathy. Had Congress gotten wind of opiate use in a subsidized housing complex, they would have introduced new bills about drug-testing residents and removing them from their homes if they tested positive. This is blatant racism, of course. Imagine if Congress were to pass laws requiring elderly white middle-class women to undergo drug testing 5 for oxy and denying them Social Security payments should they fail the test. That is unimaginable, for the simple reason that the Drug Warrior's motive is to punish the poor and minorities, not to punish respectable white women.
Don't get me wrong, I would not have wanted my mother locked up or disparaged for her substance-related issues; however, the compassionate "spin" that society gave to her use clearly demonstrates the racist nature of the Drug War. This double standard of empathy (for whites) versus anger (for minorities) when it comes to their drug use shows that the Drug War is racist in the extreme.
That's why there was a sudden outpouring of concern about the so-called opiate problem in America: the public now saw that the laws they had designed to punish minorities were beginning to cause problems for respectable white people as well. This was not what Drug Warriors had in mind, so they focused the public narrative on helping folks with oxy issues, while, of course, blaming "drugs" for all the downsides that were ultimately being caused by prohibition itself, the laws that they had passed which had outlawed all safe means of anxiety relief and virtually forced GP's to prescribe oxy, or else to lose their many anxious white patients.
But the problem is not oxy. It is not Fentanyl. It is not heroin 6. It is not morphine 7 . The problem is drug prohibition.
There was no opiate problem when opium 8 was legal in America. Thousands of young people were not dying in the streets. People used regulated product in the safety of their homes and carried on normal lives. It took drug prohibition to render drug use deadly by outlawing safe mind and mood medicine, discouraging drug education, and failing to regulate drug supply.
There are endless reasons why the Drug War is inhumane insanity; just check out my hundreds of essays on this topic. But the book "Whiteout" reminds us that the Drug War is ultimately nothing but a "respectable" way of practicing racism. The makeup of the U.S. prison population is proof of that claim. Blacks make up 13% of the American population but they account for 37% of America's record-breaking prison population9. This is, in fact, how racists and fascists win close presidential elections in America today, because they have crafted drug laws to throw their enemies in jail. Unfortunately, most Americans refuse to see this connection. The penny will not drop, even though this Drug War racism has now resulted in the election of a Russia-loving fascist and replaced democracy with insurrectionism and dictatorship.
Note: As Carl Hart reminds us, most people use drugs wisely10. Even "addictive" drugs can be used safely to fight anxiety, even though drug law policy is designed to encourage ignorance and to make safe use as difficult as possible. There are endless common-sense drug-use protocols that come to mind to fight anxiety the moment that we start learning about drugs rather than demonizing them. See my essay on Fighting Drugs with Drugs for more on this topic.
Most authors today reckon without the drug war -- unless they are writing specifically about "drugs" -- and even then they tend to approach the subject in a way that clearly demonstrates that they have been brainwashed by drug war orthodoxy, even if they do not realize it themselves. That's why I write my philosophical book reviews, to point out this hypocrisy which no other philosopher in the world is pointing out.
Drug prohibition represents the biggest power grab by government in human history. It is the state control of pain relief and mental states.
That's why we damage the brains of the depressed with shock therapy rather than let them use coca or opium. That's why many regions allow folks to kill themselves but not to take drugs that would make them want to live. The Drug War is a perversion of social priorities.
We deal with "drug" risks differently than any other risk. Aspirin kills thousands every year. The death rate from free climbing is huge. But it's only with "drug use" that we demand zero deaths (a policy which ironically causes far more deaths than necessary).
The government causes problems for those who are habituated to certain drugs. Then they claim that these problems are symptoms of an illness. Then folks like Gabriel Mate come forth to find the "hidden pain" in "addicts." It's one big morality play created by drug laws.
I can't believe that no one at UVA is bothered by the DEA's 1987 raid on Monticello. It was, after all, a sort of coup against the Natural Law upon which Jefferson had founded America, asserting as it did the government's right to outlaw Mother Nature.
The DEA conceives of "drugs" as only justifiable in some time-honored ritual format, but since when are bureaucrats experts on religion? I believe, with the Vedic people and William James, in the importance of altered states. To outlaw such states is to outlaw my religion.
There are endless drugs that could help with depression. Any drug that inspires and elates is an antidepressant, partly by the effect itself and partly by the mood-elevation caused by anticipation of use (facts which are far too obvious for drug warriors to understand).
The Hindu religion was created thanks to the use of a drug that inspired and elated. It is therefore a crime against religious liberty to outlaw substances that inspire and elate.
The sick thing is that the DEA is still saying that psilocybin has no medical uses and is addictive. They should be put on trial for crimes against humanity for using such lies to keep people from using the gifts of Mother Nature.
Ann Lemke's case studies make the usual assumptions: getting free from addiction is a morality tale. No reference to how the drug war promotes addiction and how banned drugs could solve such problems. She does not say why daily SSRI use is acceptable while daily opium use is not. Etc.
Drug prohibition represents the biggest power grab by government in human history. It is the state control of pain relief and mental states.