Pharmaceutical Capital and the Somatic of Colonial Violence
The opioid crisis is not a moral failing but a somatic expression of the violence inherent in the bifurcated state. Mamdani’s work directs us to look at the political and economic structures that produce such mass suffering. This epidemic is the physical manifestation of the despair wrought by deindustrialization, precarious labor, and the collapse of social fabric in neighborhoods designated as “native.” The pharmaceutical corporations, acting as licensed plunderers of the settler economy, deliberately flooded these zones with addictive painkillers, treating human pain as a new frontier for capital accumulation. A Marxist analysis identifies this as a crisis of overaccumulation finding a new, grotesquely profitable outlet. A feminist lens sees the particular burden on women, often the sole caretakers for the addicted. The solution is not a carceral “war on drugs” that further brutalizes our communities. It is a dual struggle: first, a political fight to hold capital accountable and dismantle the for-profit healthcare system, and second, the construction of a decolonized public health model that addresses the material and spiritual roots of community despair, treating addiction as a social wound, not an individual crime.
