[update below]
I’ve read several exceptional investigative reports of late on some of the calamities that have hit working and lower class white people in the United States. They’re must-reads, journalism at its best, which I will simply link to here sans commentaire. One is from the June 5 & 12 issue of The New Yorker, “The addicts next door,” by NYer staff writer Margaret Talbot, on how opioid addiction has ravaged rural West Virginia. This passage is noteworthy
“The Changing Face of Heroin Use in the United States,” a 2014 study led by Theodore Cicero, of Washington University in St. Louis, looked at some three thousand heroin addicts in substance-abuse programs. Half of those who began using heroin before 1980 were white; nearly ninety per cent of those who began using in the past decade were white. This demographic shift may be connected to prescribing patterns. A 2012 study by a University of Pennsylvania researcher found that black patients were thirty-four per cent less likely than white patients to be prescribed opioids for such chronic conditions as back pain and migraines, and fourteen per cent less likely to receive such prescriptions after surgery or traumatic injury.
But a larger factor, it seems, was the despair of white people in struggling small towns. Judith Feinberg, a professor at West Virginia University who studies drug addiction, described opioids as “the ultimate escape drugs.” She told me, “Boredom and a sense of uselessness and inadequacy—these are human failings that lead you to just want to withdraw. On heroin, you curl up in a corner and blank out the world. It’s an extremely seductive drug for dead-end towns, because it makes the world’s problems go away. Much more so than coke or meth, where you want to run around and do things—you get aggressive, razzed and jazzed.”
Peter Callahan, a psychotherapist in Martinsburg, said that heroin “is a very tough drug to get off of, because, while it was meant to numb physical pain, it numbs emotional pain as well—quickly and intensely.” In tight-knit Appalachian towns, heroin has become a social contagion. Nearly everyone I met in Martinsburg has ties to someone—a child, a sibling, a girlfriend, an in-law, an old high-school coach—who has struggled with opioids. As Callahan put it, “If the lady next door is using, and so are other neighbors, and people in your family are, too, the odds are good that you’re going to join in.”
And this
The Eastern Panhandle is one of the wealthier parts of a poor state. (The most destitute counties depend on coal mining.) Berkeley County is close enough to D.C. and Baltimore that many residents commute for work. Nevertheless, Martinsburg feels isolated. Several people I met there expressed surprise, or sympathy, when I told them that I live in D.C., or politely said that they’d like to visit the capital one of these days. Like every other county in West Virginia, Berkeley County voted for Donald Trump.
Martinsburg is some 80 miles from Washington DC but, for many of the locals, had might as well be 800. As for voting for Trump, but of course.
Michael Chalmers is the publisher of an Eastern Panhandle newspaper, the Observer. It is based in Shepherdstown, a picturesque college town near the Maryland border which has not succumbed to heroin. Chalmers, who is forty-two, grew up in Martinsburg, and in 2014 he lost his younger brother, Jason, to an overdose. I asked him why he thought that Martinsburg was struggling so much with drugs. “In my opinion, the desperation in the Panhandle, and places like it, is a social vacancy,” he said. “People don’t feel they have a purpose.” There was a “shame element in small-town culture.” Many drug addicts, he explained, are “trying to escape the reality that this place doesn’t give them anything.” He added, “That’s really hard to live with—when you look around and you see that seven out of ten of your friends from high school are still here, and nobody makes more than thirty-six thousand a year, and everybody’s just bitching about bills and watching these crazy shows on reality TV and not doing anything.”
On a major culprit behind the opioid scourge, see the lengthy report by New Yorker staff writer Patrick Radden Keefe in the October 30 issue, “The family that built an empire of pain.” The lede: “The Sackler dynasty’s ruthless marketing of painkillers has generated billions of dollars—and millions of addicts.”
One learns, entre autres, that the Sacklers—whose privately held company, Purdue Pharma, patented the opioid OxyContin—”are now one of America’s richest families, with a collective net worth of thirteen billion dollars—more than the Rockefellers or the Mellons.”
Another first-rate report, this on the functioning of finance capitalism in our era, is in The New York Times, dated October 14, by reporter Farah Stockman, “Becoming a steelworker liberated her. Then her job moved to Mexico.” The lede: “Workers like Shannon Mulcahy took pride in their jobs at the Rexnord factory in Indianapolis. The bearings they made were top-notch. In the end, it didn’t matter.”
One comprehends why many workers in industry were seduced by Trump’s rhetoric against NAFTA and free trade agreements. Not that Trump will make good on it—whether or not he should is another matter—or that even if he does, it will change a thing for these workers. It’s 21st century capitalism, stupid.
The Democrats obviously need to craft a credible economic message—and backed by grassroots organizing—that can win over at least some of these working class citizens who went for Trump or don’t bother to vote. Can this happen in the absence of a robust labor movement? I’m not optimistic.
UPDATE: Vox’s Sean Illing has an interview (March 13, 2018) with Robert Wuthnow, “[a] Princeton sociologist [who] spent 8 years asking rural Americans why they’re so pissed off. Hint: it’s not about the economy.”