Drug Stigma, Consumer Culture, and Corporate Power in the Opioid Crisis

Abstract

Recent efforts to rethink drug-related stigma have been increasingly considering the power dimension of the concept, to show how stigma formations flow top-down from governments, as well as other political or corporate stakeholders, towards the powerless and marginalised. Stigma attaches itself to the individual and collective identities of the substance-using subject. But it equally alters the multiple lives of the substance. In the US opioid crisis of recent decades, big pharma companies could be seen lobbying the medical profession and harnessing their power to destigmatise opioid painkillers, as part of wider marketing and sales strategies. This has been subsequently linked with rising opioid-related fatalities and spiralling harms among some of the most vulnerable groups. This theoretical paper locates the object-stigma of drugs between the cultural confines of ‘limbic capitalism’ (the drive to seek pleasure and meaning through consumption) and ‘palliative capitalism’ (the drive to pathologise and medicate ills attributed to the individual, but not the system). It argues that stigma should be viewed as a dynamic force which, under the guise of consumer culture and the veil of scientific rationality, can be manipulated by business elites to shift meanings around pain, pleasure, and addiction, in ways that are potentially conducive to social harms.