Public Health Emergency is racism

[angrychair]

90% of all deaths from opioids in 2015 were white.
Drug arrest for opioid drugs increased only 12% from 2008 to 2015.

81% of arrest for crack in 2002 were black despite 66% of crack users being white and Hispanic.

In the 1980s, as cocaine, mainly in the form of crack, hit young, poor, black males, in urban areas, it brought about hugely disparate sentencing laws, violent crackdowns on communities of color and the term “war on drugs”

In 2017, as opioid drug use rips across predominantly middle-aged, white, rural, men in conservative states, it is termed as an “epidemic” and a “Public Health Emergency”.

The differences in how each situation has been managed could not be more different.
While some could write off this new approach as “lessons learned” and as a more “enlightened” approach, the continued disparity in arrests, convictions and sentencing does not bare that out.

45* and the republican push for a “Public Health Emergency” is just another manifestation of the white nationalist approach to government that he has shown us from the beginning.

Sources:
https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/data/databriefs/db273.pdf

https://www.google.com/amp/s/articles.cleveland.com/open/index.ssf/2016/02/heroin_vs_crack_society_shifts_in_its_treatment_of_addicts.amp

https://www.google.com/amp/s/amp.usatoday.com/story/99706092/

https://m.huffpost.com/us/entry/us_59e52816e4b02a215b326f29?ncid=inblnkushpmg00000009

[genxlib]

1. I agree with you

But I think there is another factor.

In the opioid world, the gateway drug is generally a legal product that is hugely profitable for wealthy special interests.

Any discussion that characterized the opioid problem as a criminal scourge would need to come to grips with this is an uncomfortable way. Selling it as a public health crisis makes it easier to whitewash the pharmaceutical companies role in this.