ArticleCulture, medicine and psychiatry2016
The War on Drugs That Wasn't: Wasted Whiteness, "Dirty Doctors," and Race in Media Coverage of Prescription Opioid Misuse.
Article in Culture, medicine and psychiatry, 2016. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 94 papers, 1 of them a synthesis that pooled it.
What it found
Each row is one number read from the abstract, on the scale the paper reported it, with its interval. Left of the dashed line favours the treatment, right favours the comparator. Under each row is the sentence it came from. New to these charts? A ten-minute tutorial.
The abstract states no effect estimate the extractor could read, or names no intervention and outcome on the map, so this paper lights no cell and moves no belief. It is still indexed, cited and linked below.
The trial behind it
Trials whose registry record cites this paper, or whose number appears in the abstract. A trial that started after this paper was published is citing it as background, not reporting it.
Neither the registry nor the abstract names a trial number. If this is a trial report, that itself is worth knowing.
Who cites it
94 citing papers in PubMed, 1 synthesis or guideline pooled it, 380 citations in OpenAlex.
- Current perspectives on the opioid crisis in the US healthcare system: A comprehensive literature review.Medicine · 2019Pooled it
- Does a Survivorship Model of Opioid Use Disorder Improve Public Stigma or Policy Support? A General Population Randomized Experiment.Journal of general internal medicine · 2023Trial
- "In My Community, if You're an Addict, People Don't Just Look Down on You for the Drugs, but for Being Black, Too": Black and Latine Methadone Patients' Experiences Around Addiction, Methadone Treatment, and Intersectional Stigma.Journal of racial and ethnic health disparities · 2026Article
- What We Owe: A Liberatory Ethics of Harm Reduction.Nursing inquiry · 2026Article
- Cannabis policy priorities and public health: a survey of elected officials in California.BMC public health · 2026Article
- Community coalition's diversity and targeted overdose prevention strategies designed to reach special populations.Harm reduction journal · 2026Article
- Sociodemographic, behavioral, and geospatial factors associated with syringe services program use in San Francisco, California.Drug and alcohol dependence · 2026Article
- Article
- Policing harm reduction: A case study of who counts as human.Crime, media, culture · 2026Article
- Substance use stigma reduces trust and informational support: experimental evidence across risk and relationship contexts.Harm reduction journal · 2025Article
- Associations Between Opioid and Kratom Use in the USA: Differences by Race/Ethnicity and Sexual Orientation.Journal of racial and ethnic health disparities · 2025Article
- Looking into the black mirror of the overdose crisis: Assessing the harms of collaborative surveillance technologies in the United States response.Medical anthropology quarterly · 2025Article
- Assessment of knowledge and behaviors of an opioid overdose education and naloxone distribution program during the coronavirus disease 2019 pandemic.Harm reduction journal · 2025Article
- Implementing and documenting cultural adaption of evidence-based practice strategies to reduce opioid overdose deaths: examples and lessons from the HEALing communities study.Discover public health · 2025Article
- Comparing recovery community centers (RCCs) serving Black, Hispanic/Latino, and other communities: an exploratory secondary data analysis of a nationwide survey of RCC directors.Frontiers in public health · 2025Article
- "Not Knowing that I Could Get Addicted at Any Moment": Drug Use Initiation Narratives among Black Americans.Qualitative psychology (Washington, D.C.) · 2024Article
- Analysing media portrayals of people with substance use disorder and addiction: A scoping review.Cultures of science · 2024Article
- The intersection of substance use stigma and anti-Black racial stigma: A scoping review.The International journal on drug policy · 2024Article
- Decrease in injection and rise in smoking and snorting of heroin and synthetic opioids, 2000-2021.Drug and alcohol dependence · 2024Article
- Trends in fatal opioid overdoses and opioid-related emergency department visits among the black population in California, 2011-2022.Journal of the National Medical Association · 2024Article
34 more citing papers are in PubMed but not listed here.
Corrections and comments
PubMed lists nothing against this paper. Absence here is not a guarantee, only a check that was made.
Authors and funding
2 authors at 2 institutions in 1 country.
Funding
Abstract
The past decade in the U.S. has been marked by a media fascination with the white prescription opioid cum heroin user. In this paper, we contrast media coverage of white non-medical opioid users with that of black and brown heroin users to show how divergent representations lead to different public and policy responses. A content analysis of 100 popular press articles from 2001 and 2011 in which half describe heroin users and half describe prescription opioid users revealed a consistent contrast between criminalized urban black and Latino heroin injectors with sympathetic portrayals of suburban white prescription opioid users. Media coverage of the suburban and rural opioid "epidemic" of the 2000s helped draw a symbolic, and then legal, distinction between (urban) heroin addiction and (suburban and rural) prescription opioid addiction that is reminiscent of the legal distinction between crack cocaine and powder cocaine of the 1980s and 1990s. This distinction reinforces the racialized deployment of the War on Drugs and is sustained by the lack of explicit discussion of race in the service of "color blind ideology." We suggest potential correctives to these racially divergent patterns, in the form of socially responsible media practices and of clinical engagement with public policy.
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What OpenQuestion holds
Registered trials
Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.