After several years in the headlines, the U.S. opioid crisis has been in the news this summer as the federal government debates its status as a national emergency. On July 31st, the President’s Commission on Combating Drug Addiction and the Opioid Crisis, led by New Jersey Governor Chris Christie, released its interim report on the state of the …
Tag Archives: Addiction
Biofinance: Speculation, Risk, Debt, and Value from Bios: A conference report
How does the financialization of life itself figure as a new means of producing value in modern technoscience? That is the question that motivated Kirk Fiereck to convene the panel “Biofinance: Speculation, Risk, Debt, and Value from Bios” at the 2016 American Anthropological Association meeting in Minneapolis, Minnesota this November. Fiereck, panelists Melina Sherman, Danya Glabau, and Emily Xi Lin, …
Kelly Ray Knight’s addicted.pregnant.poor
Duke University Press, 2015, 328 pages
addicted.pregnant.poor is the sort of ethnography you start reading and don’t put down again until it’s finished. From its opening pages—where Knight recounts the story of trying to get into the hotel room of Ramona, her extremely high, heavily pregnant and possibly comatose informant—to the last, this is a …
Pharmaceutical Prosthesis and White Racial Rescue in the Prescription Opioid “Epidemic”
This article is part of the series: Inhabitable Worlds
Introduction
A U.S. public discourse of addiction as a disabling psychiatric condition (as opposed to a moral flaw or social deviancy) was codified into Social Security policy in 1972, following its emergence in post-war clinical science and popular media (Conrad & Schneider, 1980; Duster, 1970). In recent years, this discourse has taken divergent forms in policy and media debates surrounding …
Top of the heap: Helen Keane
This article is part of the series: Top of the heap
For this installment of “Top of the heap,” we spoke to Helen Keane, senior lecturer in sociology and gender studies at the Australian National University, who recommended a number of books and articles about addiction, drugs and alcohol.
Helen Keane
As a sociologist in the business of producing knowledge about addiction and drug and alcohol use, I like to read …
Anesthesia
Every sensation is a question, even if the only answer is silence. [i]
Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari
When Oliver Wendell Holmes Sr. delivered his introductory lecture on anatomy and physiology to students at the Massachusetts Medical College in the fall of 1847, he noted that for the patient, thanks to ether, “the fierce extremity of suffering has …