Oral Presentation Session - Executive Session Status Awarded

Sponsored by: AAA Executive Program Committee

Primary Theme: Health

Secondary Theme: Policy

(3-0760) Anthropological Interventions in the U.S. Opioid Crisis

Opioid overdose has become the leading cause of death for Americans less than 50 years old, amounting to nearly 90 fatalities across the nation each and every day. Similar to the HIV crisis that gripped the U.S. several decades ago, today’s epidemic has generated new a wave of moralizing discourses about mental health, social obligation, and the nature of the human body. Yet, even as the opioid crisis generates new and contradictory ways of knowing, disparate state agencies are more and more often attempting to coordinate their overdose prevention efforts, forcing previously flexible concepts and narratives to become “settled” in the process. In this rapidly shifting ideological terrain, much remains to be understood about the role that human cultures are playing in the shaping of the crisis and the many public and institutional responses that have blossomed in its wake. How is public discourse shaping the opioid crisis as a moral phenomenon? How are concurrent efforts to reduce the harms of opioid use and to police the consumption of opioids shaping how the crisis can be seen or spoken about? What slippage points exist between various biomedical and ethopolitical models of opioid use disorder, and how do such gaps affect those who are living with the disease? The papers presented in this panel will speak to these prescient insights that ethnographic work can provide about this pressing social issue, pursuing not only what anthropological inquiry can teach us about the opioid crisis, but also what the opioid crisis can teach us about ourselves.

Presenter(s)

• Shana Harris

  Assistant Professor
  University of Central Florida

Organizer(s)

• Jennifer Carroll

  Assistant Professor of Anthropology
  Elon University

Chair(s)

• Jennifer Carroll

  Assistant Professor of Anthropology
  Elon University

Presenter(s)

• Jennifer Carroll

  Assistant Professor of Anthropology
  Elon University

• Helena Hansen

  Professor of Anthropology and Psychiatry
  New York University

• Philippe Bourgois

  Professor
  University of California, Los Angeles UCLA

• Allison Schlosser

  Doctoral Candidate
  Case Western Reserve University

Discussant(s)

• Summerson Carr

  University of Chicago

• Angela Garcia

  Associate Professor
  Stanford University

Presentations:

• 2:00 PM - 2:15 PM

  Whose Lives Matter? An Anthropological Analysis of Public Discourse of Opioid Overdose in the U.S.
  Shana Harris – University of Central Florida
• 2:15 PM - 2:30 PM

  Fentanyl and Feelings: A Bio-cultural Understanding of Synthetic Opioids in the Illicit Drug Market.
  Jennifer J. Carroll – Elon University
• 2:30 PM - 2:45 PM

  The War on Drugs that Wasn't: White Opioids and Drug Policy as Cultural Politics
  Helena B. Hansen – New York University
• 2:45 PM - 3:00 PM

  (Almost) Missing Big Pharma's Opioid Massacre in the Eye of a US Inner-City Concrete Killing Field
  Philippe Bourgois – University of California, Los Angeles UCLA
• 3:00 PM - 3:15 PM

  Overdose and Its Afterlife: New Forms of Living and Dying in the U.S. Opioid Crisis
  Allison V. Schlosser – Case Western Reserve University
• 3:15 PM - 3:30 PM

  Discussion
  Summerson Carr – University of Chicago
• 3:30 PM - 3:45 PM

  Discussion
  Angela N. Garcia – Stanford University