Tag: Race

3D illustration of man with his brain highlighted

What Psychedelic Research Can Learn from Science, and What It Can Teach

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By Manoj Doss

As a psychedelic researcher, I find myself increasingly frustrated by the tendency of the field to make lofty claims about the drugs that stray from the realities and limitations of the data.

For example, psychedelic research that uses neuroimaging employs measures of brain function that are, in fact, quite crude. Typically, one signal in a brain scan can mean many things (amygdala activation can occur when one is scared, happy, observing something salient, etc.).

For this reason, cognitive neuroscientists typically constrain mental activity using behavioral tasks in order to make more educated inferences regarding what is happening in the mind. Yet for some reason, psychedelic scientists believe they can infer mental function from the activity of a few tripping brains under task-free conditions. That is, participants are essentially doing whatever they want in the scanner, making the number of possible inferences one could make nearly infinite. And worse, they base their claims on outdated Freudian theory.

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Miami Downtown, FL, USA - MAY 31, 2020: Woman leading a group of demonstrators on road protesting for human rights and against racism.

Understanding the Role of Race in Health: Conclusions from the Symposium

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By Craig Konnoth

In my introductory post to this symposium, I suggested that medicine and health tapped into a discourse of power that had the power to either harm or help. Medicine can trigger benefits in the law — what I call “medical civil rights,” where advocates rely on medicine’s language to trigger both formal legal rights and public advantage. At the same time, I acknowledged that black, indigenous, and people of color (BIPOC), are often left behind.

In a midpoint reflection, I theorized the problem through the lens of a double bind. On one hand, medicine erases the needs of BIPOC and the harms they experience — the health harms experienced by frontline medical workers, or caused by school and residential segregation — so that they cannot access medical civil rights. On the other hand, BIPOC are rendered hypervisible in contexts where medicine continues to oppress. They are used in clinical trials and tarred with xenophobia and narratives of genetic difference. What should be done?

Several authors offer solutions. I separate them into three categories: (1) community reform, (2) social and legal reform, and (3) medical reform. Of course, all of these solutions are interrelated. Legal and policy change drives medicine; medical research drives law, society, and policy — and both are driven through community activism and consciousness.

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Rays of light in a forest.

What the Study of Religion Can Teach Us About Psychedelics

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By Sam S.B. Shonkoff

If there is one thing that the critical study of religion unveils, it is that every enchanting and revelatory movement in human history — without exception, no matter how luminous the auras — is nonetheless human.

Psychedelics are no exception.

These substances are making a lot of brain scientists and policymakers talk about mysticism. And how could they not? A rapidly expanding body of data confirms that historically sacramental elements can induce altered states of consciousness with significant healing powers.

In contrast to today’s more conventional psychopharmacological techniques, which require regular doses to maintain chemical changes in the body, it appears that psychedelic medicines operate precisely by means of transformative experiences, the effects of which can last for months, if not years. Scholars and psychonauts alike can hardly account for these phenomena without recourse to the lexicon of religious studies.

And yet, strangely, scholars of religion have been largely absent from this discourse.

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abortion protest outside supreme court.

Reproductive Rights vs. Reproductive Justice: Why the Difference Matters in Bioethics

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By Danielle M. Pacia

When conceptualizing the pursuit of reproductive freedom, we must acknowledge the ways that our systems and structures fail Black, Indigenous and people of color (BIPOC) populations.

2020 has been a year filled with anxiety and anger over the COVID-19 pandemic’s disproportionate negative effects on BIPOC populations. Black Lives Matter protests after the unjust deaths of Breonna Taylor, Mia Green, George Floyd, Rayshard Brooks, Riah Milton, and many others whose lives ended far too soon have prompted an overdue awakening. This has caused some to reexamine racism on a personal and institutional level. Like many disciplines in our country, the field of bioethics has begun to recognize how the field reinforces racism within its scholarship.

Part of this effort includes a critical examination of the frameworks we employ when analyzing bioethical subjects and events, and how they may exclude the historical contributions and narratives of BIPOC populations. Merely acknowledging racism is not enough.

Here, I will explain the differences in the terms reproductive justice and reproductive rights and advocate use of the reproductive justice framework instead of the reproductive rights framework. Within bioethics and health law policy, there is often a lack of clarity between the terms, which, in turn, leaves their important conceptual and historical differences ignored.

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Police cars.

Law as a Determinant of Police Violence

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By Osagie K. Obasogie

One idea that distinguishes public health from medicine and other health sciences is the social determinants of health. This concept emphasizes the environmental conditions that give rise to health outcomes — poverty, lack of access to resources, exposures to contaminants, etc. — rather than locating disease solely in biological or physiological processes bounded by human bodies. Following this lead, public health interventions are often focused on community practices that can improve the spaces in which people live. The public health approach is refreshingly simple: healthy communities and environments produce healthy people.

A public health framework for understanding how police and policing impact community health outcomes is necessary as we continue to have wide-ranging conversations about excessive use of force. Improving the health of local communities involves rethinking the laws that govern how police interact with the people they serve.

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America divided concept, american flag on cracked background.

Can Psychedelics Help Save America?

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By Shelby Hartman

Amid a fractured political landscape, an unprecedented pandemic, and a reckoning with the country’s racist past, psychedelics may offer some hope for healing in the United States. In recent decades, a renaissance of psychedelic drug research has grown at prominent institutions like Johns Hopkins, New York University, and Imperial College London, among others.

Psilocybin, the psychoactive component in psychedelic mushrooms, and MDMA, sometimes confused with its adulterated version, ecstasy, have both been given breakthrough therapy status by the Food and Drug Administration (FDA), because they’ve shown so much promise for treating conditions for which we currently have few effective options. Psilocybin for treatment-resistant depression and MDMA for post-traumatic disorder are projected to be legal within the next five years as drugs that will be administered under the supervision of trained therapists.

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Woman holding sign that reads "I can't breathe."

Anti-Bias Training is Needed to Counter the Public Health Threat of Systemic Racism

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By Megan J. Shen

With the recent confirmation of Judge Amy Coney Barrett to the Supreme Court, many public health issues are seemingly on the line, including the Affordable Care Act, women’s reproductive rights, and access to in vitro fertilization. But Coney Barrett’s lack of awareness of the rampant, systemic racism in the U.S. – an oversight that generally was left out of the flurry of media coverage around her confirmation – is symptomatic of an even more pervasive and dangerous public health threat.

Senator Cory Booker’s questioning of Judge Amy Coney Barrett during her Supreme Court Confirmation hearings revealed her apparent lack of awareness of systemic racism. Booker brought up Coney Barrett’s ruling on a workplace discrimination case.

“This employee claimed that he had been subjected to hostile work environment, and that the supervisor called him the N-word,” Booker said, “But you ruled that the employee had failed to make the case that he had been fired in retaliation for his complaints about race discrimination.”

This instance is one of the clearest demonstrations of the systemic racism prevalent in the U.S. due, in large part, to a lack of anti-racist training and education.

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Why Justice is Good for America’s Health

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By Dayna Bowen Matthew

Justice is good for health [and] . . . health is the byproduct of justice.

— Norman Daniels, Bruce Kennedy & Ichiro Kawachi (Boston Review, 2000)

Among the most salient lessons to be learned from the coronavirus pandemic are that unjust laws produce unjust health outcomes, and that justice is just plain good for America’s health.

Health justice is the moral mandate to protect and advance an equal opportunity for all to enjoy greatest health and well-being possible. Health justice means that no one person or group of people are granted or excluded from the means of pursuing health on an inequitable basis. To achieve health justice, societal institutions such as governments and health care providers must act to advance equality, by increasing fairness and decreasing unfairness of their current and historic impacts on populations.

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doctor holding clipboard.

A Critical Race Perspective on Social Risk Targeting in the Health Care Sector

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By Brietta R. Clark

Health care programs, such as Medicaid, are increasingly using social risk assessments to target certain patients or communities for interventions intended to promote health. This includes partnering with other service sectors to provide nutrition, housing or employment assistance, transportation, parenting education, care coordination, and other behavioral supports.

These social interventions are touted as a way to improve health equity, yet they do not address structural racism, a powerful determinant of health. These interventions tend not to measure racial impact, or account for how racial inequity shapes the very structures and systems upon which social interventions depend. Indeed, this inattention means that such well-meaning interventions may inadvertently reinforce racial inequity, subordination, and stigma in marginalized communities.

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