Dr. Hugh Gusterson’s article “Opiates and the Masses: Populist Oligarchy and the Totalitarian Itch in the US.” was published in Today’s Totalitarianism (Feb. 20204)
In it, he explores contributing factors behind the opiate addiction crisis in the U.S.:
More a corporate oligarchy than a properly functioning democracy, the U.S. is increasingly characterized by widening income inequality, political polarization and paralysis, and a compromised state regulatory apparatus that has failed to protect the citizenry from opiate addiction, environmental injury, gun violence, the covid pandemic, and financial vulnerability. The late capitalist U.S. state apparatus, simultaneously overgrown and hollowed out, is now worked by an oligarchy of financial, energy, industrial, pharmaceutical, military and social media elites who jostle for control of the spoils and strive to extract ever more surplus value from those below them while distracting them with incitements to discourse about cancel culture, wokeness, transgender politics and celebrity gossip…
