Today, President Trump declared the opioid crisis a public health emergency under federal law, calling the crisis a “national shame and a human tragedy.”
The distinction is really about the money. As the New York Times explains, the declaration releases certain grant money and loosens certain laws, in service of treatment options. But it does fall significantly short of his campaign promise to declare the epidemic a “national emergency,” which would have immediately released a larger pool of federal funds.
This is not a small issue. By the end of 2016, fentanyl deaths had tripled in three years, and drug overdoses are expected to remain the leading cause of death for people fifty and under. It is quite likely that drug overdose deaths exceeded 60,000 last year.
You can see the government’s own figures here.
While a term like “public health emergency” is really a political and legal one, it sends a clear signal that the issue is regarded as an urgent matter of human affliction, not a law enforcement crisis requiring boots on the ground and on the necks of the afflicted.
This puts students of history in an awkward position.
As Ekow Yankah, a law professor at Yeshiva University, recently told Judy Woodruff on PBS:
Faced with a rising wave of addiction, misery, crime and death, our nation has linked arms to save souls. Senators and CEOs, Midwestern pharmacies and even tough-on-crime Republican presidential candidates now speak with moving compassion about the real people crippled by addiction.
It wasn’t always this way. Thirty years ago, America was facing a similar wave of addiction, death and crime, and the response could not have been more different. Television brought us endless images of thin, black, ravaged bodies, always with desperate, dried lips. We learned the words crack baby.
Back then, when addiction was a black problem, there was no wave of national compassion. Instead, we were warned of super predators, young, faceless black men wearing bandannas and sagging jeans.
Faced with a rising wave of addiction, misery, crime and death, our nation has linked arms to save souls. Senators and CEOs, Midwestern pharmacies and even tough-on-crime Republican presidential candidates now speak with moving compassion about the real people crippled by addiction.
It wasn’t always this way. Thirty years ago, America was facing a similar wave of addiction, death and crime, and the response could not have been more different. Television brought us endless images of thin, black, ravaged bodies, always with desperate, dried lips. We learned the words crack baby.
Back then, when addiction was a black problem, there was no wave of national compassion. Instead, we were warned of super predators, young, faceless black men wearing bandannas and sagging jeans.
The Atlantic’s Vann Newkirk also brings his keen analysis to the issue, reminding us that the journalism of the “crack baby” era fueled a panic that lingers in some form to this day:
“Crack baby” brings to mind hopeless, damaged children with birth defects and intellectual disabilities who would inevitably grow into criminals. It connotes inner-city blackness, and also brings to mind careless, unthinking black mothers who’d knowingly exposed their children to the ravages of cocaine. Although the science that gave the world the term was based on a weak proto-study of only 23 children and has been thoroughly debunked since, the panic about “crack babies” stuck. The term made brutes out of people of color who were living through wave after wave of what were then the deadliest drug epidemics in history.
“Crack baby” brings to mind hopeless, damaged children with birth defects and intellectual disabilities who would inevitably grow into criminals. It connotes inner-city blackness, and also brings to mind careless, unthinking black mothers who’d knowingly exposed their children to the ravages of cocaine. Although the science that gave the world the term was based on a weak proto-study of only 23 children and has been thoroughly debunked since, the panic about “crack babies” stuck. The term made brutes out of people of color who were living through wave after wave of what were then the deadliest drug epidemics in history.
While the shift in the way we’re talking about addiction is long overdue, it cannot happen in a vacuum.
As we move forward with this newly compassionate orientation, it is imperative that we widen that lens to include the untold number of people whose lives have been derailed by earlier declarations from the very same people who are linking arms today.
We could start by acknowledging the racial disparities in the criminal justice system, particularly where it relates to drug offenses. And we could make sure people of color have the same access to mental health and addiction services as are promised to white populations.
It’s tempting at this point in the essay to link the successful elimination of these disparities to business outcomes, and explain that a portion of the diverse talent pool employers insist they want to cultivate is wasting away in untreated pain or behind bars. True, that. But instead, it might be worth considering ways we can extend the policy grace that we’re collectively offering to opioid addicts to everyone who has been previously shamed; a radical act for a tragic age.