Redpilling: A professional reflects on white racial privilege and drug policy in American health care

Abstract

ABSTRACTThe landscape of American health care is changing under the weight of new knowledge that health care workers—physicians, nurses, and so on—are abusing the drugs that they use within health care. In this article, the author uses ethnographic data (including his own work in American pharmacies over the past two decades) to contextualize how health care’s drug abuse epidemic is racially coded to ignore the fact that White Americans are the primary drug abusers—what he calls “redpilling.” In pointing out the racial contexts of health care’s drug abuse, the author asks whether our national “war on drugs” ought to be recast to see how White racial privilege—the privilege of White Americans to comfortably perform certain actions (and get away with them if they are illegal or morally wrong)—mandates that we move the lens of drug policy from ghettos and ethnic communities to American health care where we have been historically positioned to not identify White American health care workers who work while high.