Fox News attacks NYC’s harm reduction effort with racist, anti-immigrant tropes

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On Americas Newsroom, frontier reporter Bill Melugin introduced the topic by asking: why are taxpayers forced, essentially, to license drug addicts?

Melugin ended the segment by drawing a distinction between deserving and undeserving addicts, charted along unmentioned but unmistakable racial lines. I think most people would be okay, handing out Narcan, great, okay, you want to save lives, he said. But I think a lot of people are against taxpayer-funded free crack pipes.

This seemingly innocuous phrase, which some may read as an almost progressive impulse, distils 50 years of racist drug policy down to its essence, and deserves to be unpacked in detail.

In the United States, decades of racist media narratives and government policies have linked crack cocaine to black people, so-called inner-city trouble, and a police-centric approach that interprets drug use as evidence. moral failure in the individual or the racial group. level. In contrast, in recent years, popular media reporting has turned opioids into a class of drugs associated with middle-class whites. Popular narratives of opioid abuse often blame it not on the individual level, but on structural forces such as deindustrialization and greedy, profit-seeking pharmaceutical companies.

In this dynamic, a person who uses crack implicitly coded as black is thereby rendered unworthy, while a person at risk of opioid overdose implicitly coded as white is treated as a victim in need of help.

On Outnumbered, co-host Emily Compagno also exemplified this paradigm. I understand that Narcan flows freely from every water tap, fine, she said. But the pipe, and all the rest? The outfits? Let’s make your stay a little more comfortable. Why don’t we seek help for these people, rather than a raise?

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