Poverty, Profit, Pills: How Extractive Industry Shaped America's Opioid Crisis

While the global impacts of extractive industry and environmental colonization have become more understood in recent years, research has yet to explore how the collective and cultural trauma of exploitation has helped shape the contemporary opioid epidemic. This comparative analysis focuses on the politics of extractive industries, environmental colonization, the genesis of poverty, and widespread overdose death in the United States by examining two states that historically have led the nation in opioid-related overdose deaths per capita: West Virginia and New Mexico. In 2021, while the average age-adjusted opioid overdose death rate in the United States was 24.7, West Virginia and New Mexico were well above the average with a rate of 77.2 and 37.2, respectively (Centers for Disease Control, n.d.). Riddled with unemployment, poverty, and educational disparities, New Mexico and West Virginia share a legacy of political disenfranchisement that has laid the foundation for decades of excessive death. Findings suggest that the policies that drove nuclear colonization in New Mexico and the coal mining boom of West Virginia fueled the opioid crisis experienced today. We argue that extractive industries, coupled with the introduction of “big pharma” and failing healthcare systems - fueled by neoliberalism - help explain why these two states have had, and continue to have, the highest opioid-related death rates in the United States.