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

In Policing Pain: Opioids, Crisis, and a Shifting Drug War, I explore localized opioid crisis, mass incarceration, and policing. I spent two years of fieldwork in the Southern Tier of New York (from 2017-2019), a region impacted by job loss, deindustrialization, and staggering opioid overdose death.

I argue that, while public officials argued, “We can’t arrest our way out of this,” and have supported criminal justice-based treatment services, including police-, court-, and jail-based treatment, such services have expanded the scope of the criminal justice system. Narcan-carrying police act as first responders when an overdose occurs; judges work with treatment providers to monitor defendants in criminal court; and correctional officers are trained as caring healthcare providers. This criminalizes people who use drugs, imagining them as treatable carceral subjects. Correspondingly, localized images of racialized “Black dealer” persist, driving police power for drug selling.

The incorporation of medical rhetoric and treatment within the criminal legal system, therefore, maintains drug war in rural and low-income areas facing high rates of opioid overdose as well as economic disinvestment. As ongoing drug war perpetuates state-based violence—including risk of overdose death—Policing Pain promotes harm reduction through abolitionist care that advocates for people who use drugs while seeking to minimize criminal justice involvement in drug-related issues. 

Policing Pain will be published in New York University Press’ Alternative Criminology Series.

At the Binghamton Students for Sensible Drug Policy (SSDP) Northeast Regional Conference

Rally addressing abuse by the Broome County jail doctor, with Bill Martin of JUST

At a Purdue Pharma protest in Stamford, with Truth Pharm