Refusing to Lose: The Story of Labour, Masculinity, and White Supremacy Hidden Within the Opioid Crisis


Brett Richardson, Concordia University

Among the groups overrepresented in the epidemic of drug poisonings in Canada, one, unmistakably, is white men who work in the trades. For these men, the crisis is not singular. They are living and dying in a space where multiple crises meet: a toxic drug crisis, a (white) masculinity crisis, a slow motion crisis decades underway – deindustrialization. It is no more true to say that working class white men are dying from opioids as it is to say that they are dying from loss – the loss of security and status, of pride and privilege, relative to decades gone by. It is no more true to say that they are dying from fentanyl as it is to say that they are dying from the social abandonment of their hometowns, from the spiritual vacuum left when industries and governments take a region’s resources, including the labour from its people, and then leave it, and them, behind. It is no more true to say that they are dying from toxic drugs as it is to say that they are dying from toxic masculinity, from the kind of manliness worn by men who feel they have already lost too much. Sometimes these men embody their refusal by way of tactical gear, by the boots, pants, and, indeed, polo shirts that signal: I will arm myself against further loss. Sometimes they embody their refusal by stabbing needles full of anaesthetic into their flesh, in the paradoxical self-care of self-annihilation, refusing to lose by convincing themselves that there is nothing to lose. The same men so vulnerable to trucker rally refusal are filling the beds of addiction treatment centres, and that is where I met them. Sharing elements of my ethnographic PhD project, I will introduce the audience to the grieving, and often aggrieved, men that I met, and to the transformations being undertaken in recovery. These transformations deserve our attention, because they offer clues about how to address the pervasive problems spreading out from men’s grief. Though treatment is neither an intervention or industry built to deal with the world’s systemic drug and addiction problems, treatment is nevertheless reliably transforming Canada’s wayward men. Encouraged to depend on god, to ask for help, to be of service, and to take responsibility “for their own shit,” the once hardened and sealed off are being changed as men. Though they may not know it, treatment centres are mitigating – minimally, but intriguingly – the risks that men will follow the voices tempting them towards the politics of refusal. Offering a path to a new world, treatment is mitigating the too real possibility that disoriented men will go astray and take us all down with them, holding onto the old one. When I realized that the treatment industry is offering a kind of final stop (and new beginning) for Canada’s migrating men – on pilgrimages that take them from their hometowns, to oilfields, to “rehabilitating” institutions, to the streets of Vancouver’s downtown Eastside – the broader economic crisis revealed itself. Witnessing a remarkable proportion of the more successfully “treated” become enchanted by the prospect of a new career – by an escape route from the “work hard, play harder” industries that nearly killed them – and then be absorbed by an overwhelmed treatment industry desperate for cheap labour, i realized i was watching the manufacturing economy be reborn as the service economy, one labourer-turned-care worker at a time. The treatment industry isn’t merely “catching” the men impacted by industrial decline. It is that decline. In the prophecy foretold by deindustrialization, the recovery worker is the labourer here to treat the symptoms of the very condition that created him. Exchanging power tools for self-help books, he is retrained with the soft skills of the historically feminized care economy, and yet, he is still a man. Reborn as a missionary of recovery, now he must save his brothers from the trenches. Addiction is the crucible that has delivered him into being, and it is the story he will tell in the new world.

This paper will be presented at the following session: