Opioids, opioids, opioids

Abstract

Nearly 30% of outpatient opioid prescriptions in the United States have no documented clinical reason to justify the use of the drugs. This is shown in a recent analysis of physician visit records by researchers at Harvard Medical School and the RAND Corporation published in September 2018 (Tisamarie, Sabety, & Maestas, 2018). The results are not that surprising to anyone familiar with the ongoing American opioid crisis. This is a crisis entailing the misuse of prescription painkillers, heroin, and synthetic opiates such as fentanyl. The increased prescription of opioid-based medical drugs began in the 1990s after Big Pharma had publicly assured that the drugs would not lead to addiction. Today, 25% of American heroin users started out with prescription opioids (Jones, 2013). Each day, at least 115 Americans die of an opioid overdose (CDC/NCHS, 2017). As is so often the case with scholars in the field of addiction research, misery draws our attention and interest: the opioid crisis was basically why I applied for entry into a visiting scholar programme to work in Boston in the autumn of 2018. My interest was not so much in the drug epidemic as such as in the new ways in which it was part of a stratification of the population. Why are middle-aged whites dying?

Concepts and conditions for knowledge production

“…At the editorial office we have, both in editorials and in commissioned material, paid special attention to circumstances of knowledge production. This refers for example to the space of action and claims of relevance by social science research in view of "a giant isomorphic wheel of public health" (Hellman, 2018a); the greater interest in funding research by commercial forces intent on skewing the science agenda (Hellman, 2018b); new approaches to explaining trends in use patterns (Hellman, 2018c;Kataja, Tigerstedt, & Hakkarainen, 2018); how we are to understand the epistemic project of the addicted brain (Hellman, 2018d); and circumstances that pressurise the qualitative research agenda by demands of availability and applicability in a narrow sense (Edman, 2017;Hellman, 2017;Järvinen-Tassopoulos, 2017), to name just a few.…”