The Innocence Mission: How White Drug Users Changed The Media Narrative On Addiction

'With the exception of the legislation that resulted in the creation and maintenance of the FDA, our drug laws were actually born in a series of racist panics that had nothing to do with the relative harms of actual substances.'

This exceptional line appears halfway through an even more important article by journalist and author Maia Szalavitz, who has been at the forefront of some of the most insightful and challenging recent writing about what we know about addiction – or think we do.

In this piece for the Columbia Journalism Review, Szalavitz takes aim at the stark contrasts and contradictions that have arisen out of contemporary media coverage of white victims of the so-called opiate crisis engulfing America. She challenges both the manner in which white drug addicts are represented (frequently, as innocent victims who 'accidentally' fell into a life of addiction after surgery, a car accident, or a thoughtless prescription) compared with black drug users (who are seen as culpable for their condition), and she takes on the media's damaging and incorrect conflation of addiction and dependency. 

The notion that societal and media narratives around drug issues are highly racialised is not a new one, but Szalavitz offers key context for what is an ongoing and essential discussion, and discusses the perhaps unforeseen consequences of repeated and popular poor media coverage: cutting care and help for those genuinely in need, and those who can benefit from access to (and also be greatly harmed by lack of access to) the right pain medication.