RX Appalachia: Stories of Treatment and Survival in Rural Kentucky

By Lesly-Marie Buer

• This book offers a social and cultural contextualization of drug use in the hopes of engendering ways of understanding and supporting people who use drugs without furthering their marginalization or continuing the systems of oppression in which they live.

• Previous writers have highlighted the overarching policies that enabled the opioid crisis. The current analysis expands these writings, avoiding arguments that blame culture or the individual, and instead revealing how these policies as well as neoliberal trends are articulated in a region of Eastern Kentucky with high overdose rates.

• There has rightly been controversy over the governments’ treatment of the opioid as opposed to previous drug crises. More officials in these rural areas are rhetorically supporting treatment as opposed to incarceration, but the counties are increasingly incarcerating people who use drugs. Women who use drugs are stigmatized and the treatment services they seek are punitive. In this region, efforts to decriminalize drug use have more to do with the children of people who use drugs because these Appalachian children are erroneously presumed to be all white and in need of saving.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Haymarket Books
• Release date: May 12, 2020
• ISBN: 9781642592078