The whole Deaths of Despair thesis is mostly crap analysis anyway.

It counts deaths by suicide, alcohol, and drugs as all caused by “despair”, which presumably is caused by neoliberalism, I guess?

But almost all the rise in this meta-category is due to drugs, mainly opioids

For one thing, if it were purely despair, as a proxy for neoliberal economic policy, why is the rise in these deaths so wildly lopsidedly due to one factor? The change in the other two doesn’t even come close!

I’m sure neoliberalism making us all more miserable is part of the picture...but is it really all about subjective despair?

Or is the rise in drug deaths partly, maybe mostly, due to other factors, like Oxy and the pharma boom around selling opioids to everyone they could?

Maybe the rise in drug deaths ALSO has other direct, material, structural causes like the development of Oxy and the Sackler family’s drug empire?

After all, opioid overdoses increased by about 60% from 2003-2013 among people making <20k and >50k.

I wish I’d been able to find a more detailed income breakdown, but clearly it’s not as simple as a linear relationship

Still, blaming deteriorating labor conditions for the entire rise in deaths of despair, given the outsize contribution from opioid overdoses which have risen among multiple income strata, seems at least somewhat reductive.

Then of course there’s the question of, why has it hit whites so much harder then everyone else? Are whites so much worse off now than before the neoliberal project began in the 70s, while everyone else is basically unharmed? As it turns out, no.

While white men have seen a real income decline since 1980, black men have seen an even larger decline. Women have seen wages rise, but black women slower than white women.

The gap has actually grown as a result of the neoliberal project

If all deaths of despair are due to worsening labor conditions, why aren’t black people affected by the rise in opioid deaths? They’ve been hit even harder by neoliberal economic policy than whites

Is it about wealth instead of wages? Well, no. The wealth gap is higher now than in 2000.

Unemployment? Nope. The gap is essentially unchanged since the 70s. No matter how you look at it, Black people have not been spared the economic violence of neoliberal policy that has hit white workers.

Everywhere, Black people are just as worse off, or even more worse off, as a result of neoliberalism, than whites are. Yet their drug overdose rates haven’t risen as precipitously as whites’ have. They’ve still risen a lot, but not as fast.

Well, the opioid overdose rate really diverged between the late 90s and 2010. Which is a period when rising drug deaths were driven mainly by prescription opioids and Black people were as about half as likely to receive opioid prescriptions than whites

Now that the current phase of the crisis is being driven more by illegal heroin and fentanyl than Oxy, black per capita opioid overdose rates are rapidly catching up to the white overdose rate

So. It seems clear that white workers being uniquely damaged, or damaged more severely, by neoliberalism than black workers, is false, and that there’s an alternative explanation for the rise in “deaths of despair” which are overwhelmingly opioid deaths, really.

Suicide rates are clearest evidence of “despair”, I would imagine, and they’ve risen for all groups. Suicide rates have risen faster for women than men, despite women gaining ground in employment and wages.

Suicide rates have barely changed for black, Hispanic, and Asian people, but risen substantially for whites and even more precipitously for indigenous people. So, it’s very non-linear picture and changes in economic conditions don’t seem sufficient to explain.

So, to circle back.

Supposedly whites are dying “deaths of despair” at dramatic, skyrocketing rates due to uniquely being terrorized by neoliberalism.

But neoliberalism has hit Black people even harder, yet the rate hasn’t increased as much

This gap is overwhelmingly due to the gap in drug overdose deaths, which widened uniquely from 2000-2010 and is now closing again. Pointing to a clear factor in the rise of the crisis, much more specific than deteriorating labor conditions for white workers: opioid prescriptions

So it’s quite unclear if so-called deaths of despair have been driven primarily by despair—in fact, being driven primarily by the pharmaceutical industry and the drug war seems to be more proximally responsible

Obviously, capitalism is still at fault here, but we should be specific about the mechanics of it, and blame the correct forces.

“But!” You say, “doesn’t this mean it’s all really about class then? How does white supremacy figure in?”

Well, Black people got denied opioid prescriptions because of racist stereotypes that Black patients were drug-seeking and they feel less severe pain

Generally, being more trusted by doctors and given more attentive care is a relative social benefit whites have over other groups. We can see this in innumerable ways in which non-whites, especially BIPOC, receive fatally worse care than whites

However, in this particular, unique case, the white supremacist social relations backfired, making whites more susceptible to opioid marketing and addiction. An unintended consequence.

Then, of course, there’s the drug war, which we know—based on looking at alternative models like Portugal’s—makes drug deaths more common, not less common. And how did the drug war, start, again?

Well, about that.

So, white people who uphold white supremacy very much are willing to sacrifice plenty of whites to maintain their relative benefits over other groups.

They’ll support a drug war and racist medical care that has resulted in a horrific opioid crisis killing 50k whites per year

Why? Because, overall, it hurts non white people even worse. These instances of backfiring, of unintended collateral damage, are acceptable loss, to these whites. They will stand by the system anyway. So be it. Gotta break a few eggs, right?

The bourgeoisie admit it! Lee Atwater, one of the great architects of American neoliberalism, knew damn well he was selling the neoliberal project to white Americans on the basis that it would hurt black people MORE than it hurt them

You’ve got it right there, from the mouth of the beast! The bourgeoisie are telling you that they use the *relative* benefits of white supremacy to convince a sufficient proportion of whites to defend a system that delivers *absolute* harms

Cops began in this country as slave catchers, then were pitched to city-dwellers as a defense against immigrants (only to become corrupt, reviled strike breakers), then paramilitaries enforcing Jim Crow and criminalizing blackness—when they finally became popular, respected+

+professionalized, and militarized, overhauled and led now mainly by veterans of colonial wars who brought white supremacist empire home—and finally the unaccountable gangs of hyper-violent brownshirts we see today, given their M-16s and body armor to fight “super predators”

Sold to the white public, at every step of their increasing power, increasing number, and increasing violence, as a defenders of whiteness.

So yeah, when the members of that institution shoot a white child, that’s the collateral damage. When they kill 600 white people a year, that’s the sacrificial due. It’s a due most whites are willing to pay, supporting police, approving of them, resisting calls to defund them

This is the bargain. The bargain is to sacrifice the disabled, white worker in chronic pain to the Sackler family in exchange for a medical system that will, on balance, treat black people even worse.

The bargain is paid with the blood of white Oxy addicts, to purchase the deaths of black newborns neglected by doctors in favor of white ones.

The bargain is paid in the blood of mentally ill white people murdered by police, to purchase round-the-clock colonial occupation of black and brown neighborhoods, to purchase the imprisonment of black citizens, to purchase the murders of Native Americans

When I talked about whiteness being like a cannibal god, I meant that as a metaphor. But when I talked about the cost of whiteness as human sacrifice, I was being literal.

White supremacy is a psychotic exchange of blood for blood, bodies for bodies, terror for terror. It is the alchemy by which the suffering of some whites is transmuted into the even more vicious, vaster suffering of others.

A few thousand dead white soldiers can pay for the destruction of entire nations. And majorities of white people keep making that trade.

And all the while, the only absolute benefits accrue to the bourgeoisie. That sacrifice of the dead white addict? His purchases funded the buyback of a share. The dead white kid murdered by cops? The cost of protecting bourgeois capital. The dead soldier? Most profitable of all!

Capitalism won’t be overthrown until enough white workers stop taking the fucking trade of us all being worse off to make sure nonwhites are made *especially* worse off.

At some point, some critical mass will have to wake up and see that it’s suicidal to keep trading their own suffering and their own surplus value to the state and to the bourgeoisie in exchange for a system that wreaks unspeakable violence on the rest of humanity

Or, they won’t. And we’ll go down killing each other over who gets the right to die last, and quickest.