Abstract
In Whiteout, Hansen, Netherland, and Herzberg provide a compelling and historically grounded analysis of how race has shaped criminal justice and public health responses to drug use in the United States. The book advances a clear and forceful argument: the reclassification of opioid addiction from a criminal problem to a public health crisis was neither inevitable nor race-neutral. Rather, it emerged through racialized processes that privileged whiteness and redefined addiction, victimhood, and deservingness in ways that continue to structure criminal justice policy and practice. Meaning who was an “ideal victim” worthy of treatment.
At the core of Whiteout is the claim that U.S. drug policy has long relied on racially coded distinctions to differentiate between punishment and care. The authors demonstrate how drug use among white populations has been framed as circumstantial, medical, and rehabilitative, while drug use in Black and Brown communities has historically been understood as dangerous, immoral, and criminogenic. These distinctions have had profound consequences for policing strategies, sentencing regimes, and access to diversion and treatment. In this sense, the book speaks directly to central concerns in criminal justice scholarship regarding disparity, discretion, and the uneven application of reform.
The authors situate the opioid crisis within a broader history of racial capitalism, showing how economic interests, medical authority, and racial hierarchies converged to produce differential responses to drug use. Through careful historical analysis and examination of media narratives, regulatory decisions, and institutional practices, Whiteout traces how opioids became increasingly associated with white, suburban, and rural populations. As this association took hold, addiction was recast as a public health emergency rather than a criminal threat, facilitating the expansion of treatment-oriented interventions such as medication-assisted treatment, drug courts, and diversion programs. The book makes clear that these reforms were not simply the result of new scientific knowledge, but of changing racial meanings attached to drugs and drug users.
Methodologically, Whiteout draws on interviews with healthcare providers, policymakers, and other institutional actors, as well as analysis of policy debates and public discourse. This approach allows the authors to illuminate how criminal justice and healthcare systems jointly construct responses to addiction. Particularly effective is the authors’ demonstration that criminal justice reform efforts often presented as progressive or humane are themselves shaped by racialized assumptions about who is capable of redemption and who remains subject to surveillance and punishment. In doing so, the book complicates celebratory narratives surrounding diversion and decriminalization by situating them within longer histories of exclusion.
The theoretical orientation of Whiteout is grounded in Critical Race Theory and extends Eduardo Bonilla-Silva's concept of color-blind racism into the domain of drug control and criminal justice reform. The authors show how ostensibly neutral language surrounding public health and rehabilitation can obscure the racialized distribution of compassion and resources. For criminal justice scholars, this intervention is particularly valuable in challenging explanations of disparity that focus narrowly on offense patterns or individual behavior while neglecting the cultural and institutional processes that define addiction as either a crime or a condition deserving of care.
One of the book's principal strengths is its relevance to contemporary criminal justice debates. As jurisdictions continue to expand treatment courts, harm reduction strategies, and alternatives to incarceration, Whiteout raises critical questions about the limits of reform. The authors caution that without explicit attention to race, reforms may reproduce a bifurcated system in which white drug users are increasingly diverted into care, while people of color remain disproportionately subject to arrest, prosecution, and supervision. This insight is particularly salient for scholars examining the implementation and outcomes of reform-oriented policies within policing and courts.
Despite its many strengths, Whiteout has some limitations. While the institutional analysis is thorough, the book gives comparatively less attention to the lived experiences of people who use drugs and encounter the criminal justice system, particularly individuals navigating probation, parole, or incarceration. Greater ethnographic engagement with these populations could have further strengthened the book's contribution to criminal justice scholarship by illustrating how racialized policy distinctions are experienced on the ground. Additionally, the authors engage less extensively with alternative criminological frameworks that emphasize class-based inequality or behavioral explanations of drug offending. While this reflects the book's clear theoretical commitments, broader engagement with these perspectives may have enhanced its interdisciplinary reach.
These limitations, however, do little to diminish the book's overall contribution. Whiteout succeeds in demonstrating that the shift toward treatment-oriented responses to opioids cannot be understood as a simple story of progress. Instead, the authors reveal how racial inequality has been rearticulated through reform itself, reshaping the boundary between punishment and care without dismantling underlying hierarchies.
Overall, Whiteout: How Racial Capitalism Changed the Color of Opioids in America represents a significant contribution to scholarship on drugs, punishment, and criminal justice reform. The book will be of particular interest to researchers and graduate students in criminology, criminal justice, law, and public policy. For readers of Criminal Justice Review, Whiteout offers a rigorous and necessary framework for understanding how racialized narratives continue to structure contemporary responses to drug use, even within ostensibly rehabilitative systems. By foregrounding the role of race in defining addiction and justice, Hansen, Netherland, and Herzberg provide an essential corrective to accounts of the opioid crisis that treat reform as race-neutral or universally inclusive.
