Opioid Storytelling: Rehabilitating a White Disability Nationalism

Opioid Storytelling: Rehabilitating a White Disability Nationalism argues that stories of the opioid crisis disseminate an emerging white disability nationalism that functions to morph and reconsolidate the machinery of whiteness around an affectively charged disability politics. Through a close reading of HBO's 2017 documentary Warning: This Drug May Kill You, directed by Perri Peltz, as well as Beth Macy's New York Times best book of 2018, Dopesick, this essay contends that opioid storytelling redeploys a panic about lost agency and increased vulnerabilities into a melancholic reinvestment in a fantasy ideal of white immunity nationalism. Opioid storytelling's relapsed whiteness, which invokes a long history of fears about racial degeneration, restores whiteness's category crisis by presenting middle-class whites as abled disableds, or dopesick addicts, in contrast to an unredeemable noncompliant blackness, and, in doing so, resolves the contradictions within conservative neoliberal discourses between sympathetic addicts and a simultaneous insistence on individual accountability and family values. Opioid storytelling reveals not only a contemporary morphing of a complex history of race and public health, but offers new identifications for �fragile� white subjects to reinvest in intractable hierarchies of white supremacism, while simultaneously thinking of themselves as liberal antiracists