BioSocial Futures: Toward a Symbiotic, Community Ecology of Health and Well-Being

The urgent need to address structural and social inequalities to improving substance use disorder treatment and overdose prevention is well established, as are calls for physicians and other clinical practitioners to have concrete skills in addressing social determinants of health in their role as healthcare providers. A number of studies document that healthcare providers and systems are currently not equipped to effectively address social determinants and structural inequalities as a part of their care.

This talk is based on over a decade of participant observation in the field of Translational Social Science and the use of social technologies in relation to health inequalities. It provides a case study in the author’s research on race and the development and marketing of new opioids that led to the contemporary opioid crisis. The study of opioids revealed "technologies of whiteness" - neuroscience, new biotechnology development, regulation and marketing - that explain the racial symbolism and demographics of opioid use. The talk ends by interrogating the magic bullet ideology underlying the persistent lack of investment in social and structural determinants of health equity, including the biomedicalization of addiction in the era of white opioids, while offering approaches – from “structural competency” to BioSocial research and community ecological medicine – to addressing the institutional and policy drivers of the overdose crisis.