Policing Pain: Opioids, Crisis, and a Shifting Drug War

• In Event: A Critical Approach to Policing Dynamics

Abstract

In 2020, over 90,000 people in the United States died from drug overdose. This follows a long-standing trend in rising overdose rates, largely attributed to opioids. In response, police and policymakers have argued, “We can’t arrest our way out of this,” and have called for criminal justice-based treatment efforts—rejecting traditional law-and-order approaches. How have these calls shaped the prevailing drug war? From over two years of field work in the Southern Tier of New York, which is part of the Appalachian region highly impacted by overdoses, I explore recently developed criminal justice-based treatment initiatives, including police-assisted treatment, drug-treatment court, and jail-based treatment. I find that the incorporation of treatment within the criminal justice system ultimately expands the scope of the drug war, albeit with a re-imagined type of criminal subject, a “criminal-addict” who is both criminalized and medicalized. Criminal justice-based treatment initiatives, in turn, deepen the involvement of the carceral state in the lives of people who use drugs, their families, and the broader community. As investment in drug war engenders state-based violence—including risks of overdose death—I promote harm reduction through an abolitionist lens that seeks to minimize criminal justice involvement in drug-related issues.

Author

• Kevin D. Revier, Arcadia University