The Pain of Poverty: Nonmedical Prescription Drug Use Among Marginalized Men and Women

• In Event: 3221 - DIY Medicine: Hacking Health, Opting Out, Self-Medicating, and Consumer Resistance

Abstract

In 1980, The World Health Organization listed “freedom from pain” as a universal human right. Pharmaceutical companies capitalized upon this promise, offering patients chemical solutions to physical and emotional problems. However, while prescription drugs moderate pain they do not address underlying causes of physical and emotional pain such as poverty, victimization, or the inability to access alternative healthcare treatments. In fact, these factors might be responsible for many of pain patients’ symptoms, including that derived from suffering from physical injury, emotional trauma, and obesity-related problems. As a result, prescribers write scripts for pharmaceutical drugs to treat the symptom of pain, but the underlying causes are left unaddressed. In doing so, such issues are exacerbated by such liberal prescriptions in the absence of other crucial social services. This paper seeks to unpack the cultural contradictions that have arguably produced a prescription drug “epidemic” that disproportionately impacts the poor, women, the elderly, and those who have suffered psychological or physical abuse. Based upon 80 in-depth interviews with incarcerated men and women, this paper gives voice to a population who is otherwise rendered silent and invisible and demonstrates how individuals who use prescription drugs without the oversight of a doctor primarily do so to manage challenges posed by poverty, trauma, and insufficient healthcare. In doing so, they are stigmatized and criminalized for coping with economic, social, and healthcare structures through self-medication.

Author

• Michelle Hannah Smirnova, University of Missouri - Kansas City