EDITORIAL –
March 4, 2025 – Contrary to popular rhetoric, drug addiction is not the cause of poverty but one of its chief consequences. Studying the dynamics of crack houses in New York and open-air drug markets in Kensington, Philadelphia, the ethnographer Philippe Bourgois found a pattern of lives scarred by a combination of state neglect and violence: abusive childhoods, crumbling schools, abandoned neighborhoods…
This decades-long rise in drug mortality has yet to have any substantive influence on the United States’ sclerotic drug policy; the current crisis remains widely viewed as a discrete epidemic, disconnected from the history that precedes it. Rather than ask what lies at the root of persistent substance use, this myopic framework—peddled by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, parroted by politicians and industry leaders—focuses on individual drugs as causative vectors, while locking addiction in the realm of individual neurobiology.
The public is led to believe that the usual responses to epidemics will somehow work for drug addiction: isolate, quarantine, and treat the sick. This almost always means criminalization, incarceration, and compulsory treatment—or else bizarre interventions like the Department of Defense’s quixotic search for a fentanyl “vaccine.” The endless declaration of one drug epidemic after another also perpetuates a blinkered state of emergency, necessitating the spectacle of a disaster response to yet another drug “outbreak.” This not only forecloses the possibility of a response that’s actually effective, it precludes a deeper understanding of the role of drugs in American life. What Jalal and Burke’s exponential curve lays bare is the accumulation of our long, slow, and violent history.
