In the past few years, opioids have seen an increase in media attention, as the country grapples with what has been called an opioid epidemic. However, opioid addiction is not just a plague of recent decades; the phenomenon of widespread opioid addiction dates back to the 19th century when the Civil War sparked the United States’ first opiate addiction epidemic among ailing veterans. Nineteenth-century opiate addiction cases usually originated in doctors’ prescriptions, a disturbing parallel with today’s ongoing opioid crisis resulting from opioid overprescribing during the 1990s.
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This enduring racial gap in the opiate addiction rate stemmed largely from racist 19th-century medical beliefs about Black bodies, coupled with substandard medical care provided to Black Civil War troops. Nineteenth-century psychiatry posited that, among other causes, opiate addiction stemmed from mental overstimulation, which led to insanity and substance abuse. Such overstimulation could only occur among intelligent, sensitive White Americans, according to Civil War–era psychiatrists. In contrast, White medical authorities claimed that Black Americans were too “simple-minded” to experience mental overstimulation, which precluded them from insanity and opiate addiction.

According to J. D. Roberts, a North Carolina doctor, Black bodies lacked “the same delicate nervous organization” as Whites, and thus “d[id] not demand the form of stimulant conveyed in opium” as did Whites. Black people, Roberts claimed, also had a “general ignorance” of medical care, an assertion implying that Black Americans lacked the knowledge to care for their health needs by self-medicating with opiates, as White Americans often did.9

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The relative infrequency of opiate addiction among Black Americans compared with White Americans has been touted as a “protection,” shielding African Americans from the brunt of the opioid crisis.20 Considered in the historical context, however, such rhetoric misses the mark. While it is true that during the Civil War–era opioid crisis and that of today, iatrogenic opioid addiction has been less prevalent among Black Americans than White Americans, this racial disparity should not be celebrated as a metaphorical silver lining. Instead, the relative infrequency of prescription opioid addiction among African Americans in the last century and a half merely reveals the long-standing, destructive influence of structural racism in American health care that has been, and continues to be, manifested in Black Americans’ unequal access to essential opioid medicines

Last month Andrew Frame, the CEO of crime reporting and neighborhood watch app Citizen, violated his own app's policies by telling staff to broadcast the personal information of an individual they mistakenly suspected of starting a wildfire, putting a $30,000 dollar bounty on that person's head, and telling workers the company needed to "FIND THIS FUCK," potentially putting this person's safety in danger. Motherboard reported this with multiple sources and caches of internal Citizen documents, including Slack chat
[link:https://www.vice.com/en/article/wx5xj9/apple-google-citizen-policies-manhunt-bounty|

Citizen had gotten a tip that the wildfire was started by an arsonist, and Frame had decided earlier in the night that the fire was a huge opportunity. Citizen, using a new livestreaming service it had just launched called OnAir, would catch the suspect live on air, with thousands of people watching. Frame decided the Citizen user who provided information that led to the suspect’s arrest would get $10,000.

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He was growing impatient. He increased the bounty to $20,000. Thousands of people were watching Citizen's livestream, but the man still hadn't been caught. Frame asked his staff to send out another notification, one that would hit all Citizen users in Los Angeles. The bounty had to go higher.
"Close in on him. 30k Let's get him. No escape. Let's increase. 30k," Frame said. "Notify all of la. Blast to all of la."
"Citizen is OnAir: Arsonist Pursuit Continues," the notification, which went out to 848,816 Citizen users in Los Angeles, said. "We are now offering a $30,000 reward for any information directly leading to his arrest tonight. Tap to join the live search."

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Users are flooded with notifications in what multiple sources interpret as an attempt to make users feel anxious enough about their neighborhoods to buy "Protect," a $19.99 per month service that allows users to livestream their phone's camera and location to a Citizen "Protect agent" who monitors it and sends "Instant emergency response" in case of an emergency.
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It was Dec. 8, 2018. Manuel had just become the first transgender man to box professionally in the United States -- and the first to win.
But two and a half years since that professional debut against Hugo Aguilar, since making that promise, Manuel has yet to return to the ring and does not know whether he ever will again.
Since his amateur debut in 2016, Manuel has entered the ring for only three official fights -- a slim record for any boxer to take into the pros. He spent months at a time traveling to amateur exhibitions, weighing in, only to watch his opponents refuse to get into the ring with him.


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Manuel has experienced race and gender as few others have. "I can't disconnect my Blackness from my gender identity," he says. "Who I am, how I have moved through this world when I was identified as a quote-unquote 'light-skinned, mixed-race Black girl,' is a very different experience than a light-skinned, mixed-race Black man."

While studies show that women of color also suffer disproportionate violence from law enforcement, Manuel says he noticed a difference in how police treated him after his transition. In 2014, as he drove through Koreatown one night, a police officer noticed the expired tags and busted headlight on his car and pulled him over. The officer asked Manuel, who had undergone gender affirmation surgery earlier that year, to step out of the vehicle. As someone raised by white women, his mother and grandmother -- and, in many ways, raised to be a white woman -- his first reaction was to question the order. Don't, another part of himself said even more forcefully.

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Even before he transitioned, police would pull him over but would soon take note of his female markers once the officer got closer. Now, fully presenting as male, he felt terrified. "This is how you die: not doing s--- but just being seen as a threat. Having police pull guns on you, having police put you on the curb, sitting on your hands, because of a fix-it ticket."

A 12-year-old boy received the ultimate surprise in Forestville, Maryland, on June 16 when he was reunited with his father upon his release from prison.

Jonathan Stewart captured the emotional moment when his brother, Coach Joe, and his son, TayRon, embraced for the first time. Father and son had kept in contact throughout Joe’s imprisonment, per Yahoo, with Joe often helping his son with homework over the phone. However, as noted by Stewart, this was the first time they had seen each other since Joe’s imprisonment.

“He just thought he was being picked up from routine workouts,” Stewart said, adding that TayRon “had no idea of what he was about to see.”

It appears Stewart provided no additional details about what landed Joe in prison or how long his stint was, but one Instagram user commented on the reunion video: “We can make assumptions about why he was in prison or about what kind of person he is, but at the end of the day, we don’t know. So let’s enjoy this beautiful video.”

A Netflix actor is peddling t-shirts on Instagram to purportedly raise money so he can sue his local newspaper for reporting about his involvement in January’s failed MAGA coup.


FBI agents raided the North Hollywood home of actor Siaka Massaquoi last week after he was seen in videos taken inside the U.S. Capitol building during the January 6 insurrection.

Massaquoi most recently appeared in two episodes of Ryan Murphy‘s super queer Netflix series Ratched, playing a priest named Father Adeyemi. His other credits include TV shows like NCIS, Lethal Weapon, and S.W.A.T., plus several appearances in short films.

Exactly why the FBI raided his home is unclear, though FBI spokesperson Laura Eimiller confirmed a search warrant was filed in advance and said that, ultimately, no one was arrested.

The granddaughter of iconic jazz singer Nina Simone is breaking her silence and is directing her anger toward Vice President Kamala Harris.

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Kelly responded in a thread of tweets and aimed her anger at Harris, who served as the California attorney general from 2011 until 2017. She accused Harris of taking the rights to her grandmother’s estate away from her family.

“Nina’s granddaughter here. My family doesn’t run her estate anymore. It was taken away from us & given to white people. Our family name was DRAGGED in the media,” Kelly said. “We get NO royalties, nothing. Wanna hold someone accountable? Ask Kamala Harris why she came for my family #NinaSimone.”

But Kelly failed to mention that her mother, Lisa Simone Kelly, was only left a condo based on her Nina Simone’s will. What’s more, Kelly reached a settlement with the Superior Court of the State of California in a legal proceeding overseen by then-California Attorney General Kamala Harris in which she resigned her role as trustee and administrator of the Estate of Nina Simone and Nina Simone Charitable Trust.
In court documents, it was revealed that in her will, Nina Simone left her daughter a condominium in Los Angeles, but requested that “all residue to be held in trust and used ‘for the musical education of black African children from South Africa, Liberia and Ghana.'”
Lisa Simone Kelly also tried to initiate a French forced heirship claim to Nina Simone’s assets other than the condo, which was rejected in court because French forced heirship law “does not apply to the distribution of the Estate’s assets.”