Thinking Allowed Folgen

Opioids in the US and UK; Laurie Taylor explores the changing nature of opioid use, from street heroin to synthetic prescription drugs. Helena Hansen Professor of Psychiatry and Anthropology at the University of California, Los Angeles, reveals the surprisingly white “new face” of the US opioid crisis. Although Black Americans are no more likely than whites to use illicit drugs, they are much more likely to be incarcerated for drug offenses. Meanwhile, a very different system for responding to the drug use of whites has emerged. White opioids – the synthetic opiates such as OxyContin - came to be at heart of epidemic prescription medication abuse among white, suburban and rural Americans. Why was the crisis so white? How did a century of structural racism in drug policy lead, counter intuitively, to mass white overdose deaths?Also, Alex Stevens, Professor of Criminal Justice at the University of Kent, provides a UK perspective, charting the rise of synthetic opioids which are much more potent than heroin. Heroin related deaths are concentrated in people over 40, who live in deindustrialised areas and are nine times higher in the most deprived decile of neighbourhoods in England. He argues that their increasing presence in the drug supply could dramatically increases the number of deaths as has been seen in the USA.This episode contains a clip from a TV programme Horizon recorded by Dr Michael Mosley in 2020 exploring painkiller use in Britain. Producer: Jayne Egerton

Garden Utopias: Michael Gilson, Associate Fellow of the School of Media, Arts and Humanities, University of Sussex, takes Laurie Taylor behind the privet hedge, to explore the suburban garden and the beautification of Britain. How did millions of British people develop an obsession with their own cherished plot of land? Although stereotyped as symbols of dull, middle class conformity, these gardens were once seen as the vanguard of progressive social change, a dream of a world in which beauty would be central to all of our lives. Also, JC Niala, anthropologist, allotment historian and writer, discusses 36 months of fieldwork on allotment sites and guerrilla gardened streets across Oxford and suggests these are places where urban gardeners imagine, invent, and produce a hopeful future within their city.Producer: Jayne Egerton

Richard Sennett, leading cultural and social thinker and Emeritus Professor of Sociology at the London School of Economics, talks to Laurie Taylor. Growing up in a housing project in Chicago, he originally trained in music. An accident put paid to his cello playing and he turned to sociology. Over five decades he’s documented the social life of cities, work in modern society and the sociology of culture. His latest study explores the relations between performing in art (particularly music), politics and everyday experience. It draws personally on Sennett's early career as a professional cellist and explores the dangerous and ambiguous nature of performance, from the French theorist, Michel Foucault's hypnotic lectures to the demagoguery of contemporary politicians. He describes the tragic performances of unemployed dockworkers in New York City in the 1960s, as they competed for a dwindling number of jobs, and Aids patients in a Catholic hospital doing a reading of As You Like It and displaying defiance in the face of death and religious disapproval. Producer: Jayne Egerton