The book Whiteout is critical examination of how whiteness has thoroughly infected the marketing and perception of the opioid crisis in America from an unabashedly radical-left perspective. The authors present ethnographic and historical analysis of pharmaceutical manufacturers, regulators, neuroscientists and addiction physicians to track what they label as "technologies of whiteness" in neuroscience, pharmaceutical development, regulation and marketing that stem from drug policies that date back over a century.



Whiteout is based on a decade of participant observation, interviews and archival research and argues that the current popular perception of the opioid crisis has been driven by white consumption. As a consequence, over the past two decades, media images of the surprisingly white “new face” of the US opioid crisis abounded. But while the popular consensus foregrounds that skyrocketing overdoses were “deaths of despair” signaling deeper socioeconomic anguish in white communities, Whiteout argues that the opioid crisis was also the intrinsic product of white racial privilege.