Smoke and Ashes by Amitav Ghosh

Author:Amitav Ghosh
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux

These words were all too prescient. It was precisely by actively creating a ‘public taste’ for opium, among ‘discountenanced’ and dispirited American communities, that the producers of prescription opioids addicted millions of people to prescription opiates. And, to a quite remarkable degree, those behind the opioid crisis—the rogue doctors, pharmacists, salesmen, executives and tycoons—were as indifferent to the suffering they had caused as their nineteenth-century predecessors. ‘Those who bear responsibility for America’s national nightmare,’ writes Chris McGreal, ‘show no … sense of guilt or torment. Even today, they shift responsibility for the epidemic onto those who fell victim to it.’113 Like the upper-crust American opium traders of the nineteenth century, contemporary ‘drug dealers in Armani suits’ blamed the addicts. ‘They get themselves addicted over and over again,’ wrote Richard Sackler. ‘They engage in it with full, criminal intent. Why should they be entitled to our sympathies?’114 For them, the distressed rural folk who were worst affected by the opioid crisis were just as expendable as poor Asian addicts had been for their counterparts in the nineteenth century.

It is, to my mind, an entirely positive development that the current crisis has forced a reckoning with the extraordinary powers of the opium poppy, stirring up enormous outrage against the companies that reaped gargantuan profits from prescription opioids. It is notable, however, that it took a crisis that disproportionately affected white Americans to bring about this reckoning. Equally striking is the fact that the outrage against the manufacturers of prescription opioids has not led to a wider reckoning with the West’s role in the promotion of opiates: this is a sign, I think, that narcotics are still being projected on to ‘illegal aliens’ and foreign countries in deeply misleading ways. If the story of the role that privileged, upper-class white Americans had played in the history of the opium trade were better known it would surely be more difficult, if not impossible, to impose xenophobic, anti-immigrant framings on issues concerning narcotics, as is still so often done in the United States.115

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