The US and Israel have the world's worst opioid epidemics. Here's an Apartheid Studies explanation.
Apartheid by any other name is still apartheid, and we always seek hard evidence that demonstrates this truth. Indeed, by means of inductive forensics, we frequently see hard evidence of this truth in novel yet elegant ways. Hence, for example, Apartheid Studies, through the instrumentation of decimalisation and sabbaticality, helps us understand in superlative aspect how America and Israel have the world’s highest rates of opioid abuse and addiction, yet, at the same time, there is surprisingly comparably very little of this national addiction to painkillers in places like Gaza and Afghanistan. The answer, while operating like a quantum superposition, is still an unexpectedly simple one. Apartheid on holiday is still apartheid and so cannot fake its own prevalence and virulence. Neither can it pass a Turing Test. So, detectability is always just a few truthful, truthfully asked, questions away. Ultimately, it is critical for us to continuously seek to understand the human experience of pain and the itinerary of pain in the human, for these march in step with the operating system of apartheid. That is, there is now putative, but also empirical, evidence that the distribution of eugenics upon which American unipolarity depended on can be successfully defaulted against – a contraindication most at play in the global south or the so-called developing world. Little wonder, then, that the nations with the sternest national security doctrines, and that most secure themselves through causing others instrumentalised pain and harm, now have the world’s severest opioid epidemics. This should never be a surprise. At least, it should never be a surprise to those who carefully study the global itinerary of apartheid. The answer is to be found, precisely, in the “pain holiday” that these nations historically fashion and enjoy. In a word, the US and Israel, by this measure alone, easily articulate the world’s severest, most diffuse apartheid norms. The means by which we arrive at this conclusion, however, require that we rigorously apply and practice the method and vocation of inductive forensics outlined in the foundation text, Apartheid Studies: A Manifesto, Vol 1. and its sibling texts.
Excellent post. In my linked-in post reacting to Dr Gillian Marcelle's post on global inequality and coloniality, I drew from Apartheid studies, especially the concept of decimilsation to characterise the racial nature and primitive accumulation of the global economic system, which has reproduced itself in the digital economy.