Drug Decriminalization in Maryland Through an African Centered Research Paradigm- Analysis and Recommendations

see the causal relationship between self-scrutiny and a willingness to promote social
change, including the profound social changes that antiracist policies require. Even today,
social conservatives (and others) retain the option of preserving the traditional racial
hierarchy and its racist folklore inside their heads, while conforming to antiracist public
norms that enforce public civility and a degree of racial integration within “disciplined”
workplaces such as hospitals and clinics. There can be no doubt that many doctors choose
this option, thereby disciplining their social conduct but not their racial imaginations.
The research I have done for this book confirms that physicians share the racial attitudes
of their fellow citizens. Indeed, their intimate involvement with medically afflicted black
bodies and minds may even create and intensify feelings about the racial differences they
perceive. There is, then, no evident reason to assume that doctors feel greater sympathy
toward or possess a greater understanding of African Americans that most whites do. On
the contrary, it is probable that many doctors, like police officers, are exposed to more
than their fair share of extreme and unattractive behaviors of the troubled and the indigent,
a disproportionate number of whom may be black. These experiences do not produce racial
goodwill. Consequently, as one African American physician commented in 1990: “The
problem is not that medical providers are ethically deficient compared with the public, it
is that we are no longer any better. Our ranks include racists and virtually every other
variety of impaired citizenry. (Hoberman, 2012).
This has profound implications for the theory of change laid outlined by Domoslawski. The idea
that doctors and law enforcement officers, who are both structurally inoculated from accountability
specifically to Black populations and given legally sanctioned authority over the lives of
oppressed, can engage as a political “equals” with racialized drug users, specially Black drug users,
is ignorant of not only political economy which creates a massive power imbalance within this
“coalition”, but the “libidinal” economy undergirding vision of racialized drug users as threats to
white society and the authority of the very cops and doctors Domoslawski and those like him are
asking drug users to work with.
It could be argued, in Domosławski’s defense, that he is specifically a Polish journalist
writing about his observations around drug decriminalization in Portugal, which does not have the
same racialized history around policing that the United States has. Rather than challenging this
critique of eurocentric research paradigms, this argument precisely proves why it is so dangerous.
In the physical sciences, research findings can be translated from one country or language to
another with confidence that the physical properties underlying the interactions will not change
from country to country. The notion that anything analogous can be done with social science
should be on face ridiculous, given the specific contextual histories of social formations (and
specifically, racialized violence) and how it differs from nation to nation. Yet there are attempts to
treat the social science question of addiction as if biological processes involved in chemical
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