Dr. Helena Hansen presents the Annual Racial (In)Justice Annual Lecture, co-sponsored by the UBC Departments of Anthropology and Sociology in partnership with the School of Population and Public Health.
This talk excavates the ways in which the US “opioid crisis” has been associated with whiteness. Using observations in addiction medicine along with the rise of Oxycontin marketing, it examines various “technologies of whiteness,” such as neuroscience, biotechnology, regulation, and marketing, to explain how opioids became racially symbolic. The talk concludes with a glimpse of alternatives to racial capitalism as the foundation for healthcare in the US and and beyond.
Helena Hansen, an MD, Ph.D. psychiatrist-anthropologist, is Professor and Interim Chair of Psychiatry and Biobehavioral Sciences at UCLA’s David Geffen School of Medicine and Interim Director of the Semel Institute for Neuroscience and Human Behavior. She is the author of three books: Addicted to Christ: Remaking Men in Puerto Rican Pentecostal Drug Ministries; Structural Competency in Medicine and Mental Health: A Case-Based Approach to Treating the Social Determinants of Health (with Jonathan Metzl); and Whiteout: How Racial Capitalism Changed the Color of Heroin in America (with Jules Netherland and David Herzberg, forthcoming). She has received numerous awards, including an honorary doctorate from Mount Sinai School of Medicine in New York, and election to the National Academy of Medicine.