Overview

How We Hurt dives into the institutional and cultural dimensions of the ongoing opioid epidemic. In a detailed analysis of pain management, opioid regulation, pharmaceutical branding, self-help, and public discourses on opioid addiction, Melina Sherman argues that the linchpin underlying the opioid epidemic's evolution in North America is the problem of pain. By unpacking the politics of pain in different domains, How We Hurt shows how the crisis emerged and shifted, and why it looks the way it does today. The book's chapters begin by tracing the trajectory of opioids in pain management, where decisions regarding the measurement of pain led to relief becoming wedded to opioids in medicine. The following chapters examine the problem of pain in opioid regulation, pharmaceutical branding, and the self-help industry. In these areas, a disastrous combination of strategic ignorance and deep-seated ties between public health entities and pharmaceutical companies drove the influx of opioids onto the market and into our medicine cabinets. The book's penultimate chapter applies the analysis of pain to the problem of opioid addiction in popular discourse and shows how the opioid crisis has evolved alongside new conceptions of addiction and people who use opioids that condition whose pain is seen as legitimate and whose is not. Finally, the book concludes by considering the implications of its findings for the development of drug policy and future research on public health disasters, insisting on an interdisciplinary and multi-faceted approach to the study of pain and its place American culture.

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9780197698228

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Reviews

"Pain is the root of the opioid crisis. In this stunning book, Melina Sherman takes us to the depths of American despair, the heights of pharmaceutical corruption, and the netherworld where narcotic promises dissolve. How We Hurt is an incendiary, infuriating, and utterly necessary book."" Eric Klinenberg, author of 2020: A Social Autopsy and Palaces for the People How We Hurt is the most rigorous analysis to date on the causes and consequences of the opioid epidemic that has killed over one million people and wrecked families and communities around America. Brilliantly written, it will redefine the terms of the public debate. Essential reading for policy makers, students, journalists, and concerned citizens."" Manuel Castells, Professor Emeritus of Sociology, University of California, Berkeley Sherman's book is incredibly timely, important, and absolutely unique. She offers readers an often overlooked history of the opioid crisis, and makes crucial connections between the regulation of pharmaceutical drugs, the moral and social panics around the opioid ""epidemic"" the branding of painkillers as a ""right to be free from pain,"" and the histories of physicians and medications, giving us in the process a beautifully written and urgent framework for critically analyzing the different dimensions of drug use, and over-use, in US society. Her important critique of the structures of constraint, control and exclusion that characterize what we now call the opioid epidemic is essential reading for not only academics but also the public at large. An absolute must-read!"" Sarah Banet-Weiser, Professor, Annenberg School for Communication"

Author Information

Melina Sherman is a communication scholar and lead health researcher at Knology in New York City. Her research interests center on the relationship between health, culture, and media. Her work has appeared in a number of communication and social science journals, including Public Culture, Communication, Culture & Critique, and the International Journal of Communication.

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