Editor’s note: This article was initially published in The Daily Gazette, Swarthmore’s online, daily newspaper founded in Fall 1996. As of Fall 2018, the DG has merged with The Phoenix. See the about page to read more about the DG.
The Black Studies Department invited Samuel Roberts, Associate Professor of History at Columbia University, to campus yesterday to talk on “The Politics of Race, Stigma, and Heroin Abuse in New York City.” The lecture was a general survey of Roberts’ ongoing sociomedical research on the particular 20 year stretch (from 1955 through 1975) during the initial onslaught of heroin abuse and the premier of “the narcotic scare” on the public consciousness.
As a public health historian, Roberts’ previous works included a novel titled Infectious Fear, a study of tuberculosis politics and treatment in the Jim Crow-era urban South. His latest research (and the subject of the talk) explores drug war-related public health issues which juxtapose the two sides of the needle exchange and methadone debates against the background of disease. In his research, Roberts endeavors to explore what political and economic determinants cast drug-related illness in different lights. Why is there strong opposition to certain drug policies from communities that stand to benefit from them? How have these policies become suspect?
Roberts’ thesis contends that the role of problematic, socially-constructed stigmas, both perceived and enacted, prevent good social policy from being carried out. Using the needle exchange and methadone rehabilitation programs as examples, Roberts proceeded to explain how enduring criticism or support came about in response despite the methods’ actual detrimental or beneficial value.
Needle exchange programs, for instance, have been shown to effectively reduce rates of hepatitis and HIV transmission when coupled with drug counseling, yet many groups, particularly minorities for which the program has the biggest impact, have expressed great skepticism in response. Why? Historical neglect and abuse of such communities certainly plays a part in the suspicion, but Roberts posits that the stigma-conditioned behavior also is a large factor in determining each community’s response.
Society, then and now, frames the heroin issue so as to avoid the central issue of race relations and community politics. The debate then becomes, in Roberts’ words, “a political football one way or the other”, continuously influencing views with no real rationale basis. Roberts used the term moral panic, coined by sociologist Stanley Cohen, to describe the effect: a minority group is severely stigmatized and labeled as “bad” for society in an overly hyped campaign fueled by emotive imagery and language (i.e. the drug epidemic). Smoking opium, for instance, was banned largely due to anti-Chinese immigrant sentiment in the early 1900s though it was cloaked in a moral argument. The behavior was labeled as extremely detrimental to health and morally deviant; on the other hand, society tolerated alcoholism, a raging habit which had claimed far more lives, “without panic.”
Roberts concluded the lecture with a general overview of things to ponder when discussing heroin abuse then and now. He argued that this and other issues, rooted in moral panic, should be cast through a critical lens taking that sociological effect into account before analysis. Through continued research, Roberts hopes to reveal more about the heroin era in New York and its associated cultural and social phenomena.
