The event topic and title were changed two days before it was set to take place.
The University of California at Los Angeles (UCLA) medical school recently scheduled a lecture focused on the role “whiteness” played in driving the opioid crisis — but abruptly changed the topic of the lecture just two days before it was supposed to take place and limited attendance to in-person only.
Last week, UCLA health advertised an event with professor Dr. Helena Hansen titled, “Beyond Magic Bullets: Whiteness as a Structural Driver of the Opioid Crisis.” The Gold Humanism Honor Society sponsored the lecture, according to a poster obtained by National Review. The event was scheduled for April 4, in-person in the school’s Tamkin auditorium, with an option for Zoom attendance.
The Gold Humanism Honor Society (GHHS) calls itself “a community of medical students, physicians, and other leaders who have been recognized for their compassionate care.”
“GHHS reinforces and supports the human connection in healthcare, which is essential for the health of patients and clinicians,” the website adds. GHHS’s recent summit included sessions on Diversity, Equity and Inclusion in health practice, ableism, “trauma-informed” medical care, and other so-called “humanist” topics.
On Tuesday, UCLA medical school sent an abrupt email update, obtained by National Review, to the student body revising the topic and setting of Hansen’s speech. The title of the lecture was changed to “BioSocial Futures: Towards a Symbiotic, Community Ecology of Health.”
“NOTE: This is now an in-person-only event, with no Zoom attendance or recording available,” the email read.
Hansen is a trained psychiatrist and anthropologist and authored the book, Whiteout: How Racial Capitalism Changed the Color of Opioids in America. Neither UCLA Medical School nor Hansen immediately responded to request for comment.
The opioid epidemic has plagued the U.S. over the past two decades and contributed to the deaths of more than 560,000 Americans, according to the Federal Communications Commission. In recent years, some drugmakers have acknowledged their responsibility in the crisis. In 2020, OxyContin maker Purdue Pharma pleaded guilty to three criminal charges, specifically admitting to obstructing the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration’s efforts to fight the opioid addiction crisis. The company also confessed that it had not implemented an effective program to prevent prescription drugs from landing on the black market, though it had previously told the DEA it had such a mechanism, according to the Associated Press.
Purdue also admitted it had proffered misleading information to the agency in order to bolster company manufacturing quotas and that it has paid doctors via a speakers program to persuade them to write more prescriptions for its painkillers.
In 2021, a federal jury found that pharmacies operated by Walmart, CVS, and Walgreens recklessly distributed opioid painkillers in two Ohio counties. The failure resulted in hundreds of overdose deaths, prosecuting attorneys said.
The canceled UCLA “whiteness” lecture is just the latest example of the school’s emphasis on racial identity: the university’s medical school recently held a first-year mandatory class called “Structural Racism and Health Equity,” the Daily Wire’s Ben Shapiro reported. As part of the curriculum, UCLA medical students were instructed to read about wars of “Indigenous resistance” to “imagine what liberation could look like.” Native American tribes killed thousands of white people in those armed conflicts, the publication noted.
Suggested reading for students also included the article, “Decolonization is not a metaphor,” as part of the class’s emphasis on envisioning “a world in the aftermath of settler colonialism and white supremacy.”
Emails obtained by the outlet found that students in the class were encouraged to listen to a podcast entitled “Indigenae” that specifically addresses Indigenous people’s health and uses the gender identities “two-spirit” and “womxn.”
In late January, National Review reported that a first-year core course at UCLA medical school requires students to read articles advocating for the abolition of borders as a public health imperative and arguing that the current border crisis is a myth.
Structural Racism & Health Equity (SRHE) asks students to read the scholarly article titled “Beyond border health: Infrastructural violence and the health of border abolition” and a news article, “A system of global apartheid: author Harsha Walia on why the border crisis is a myth.” The readings were assigned for a section of the class titled, “Histories of Imperialism.” The documents were obtained by medical transparency nonprofit Do No Harm.
The first article claims that open borders are a remedy to global illnesses such as those ailing migrants originating from the Northern Triangle (an area comprised of Guatemala, El Salvador, and Honduras). It finds the conditions driving mass migration to be colonialism, U.S. imperialism, neoliberalism, and border militarization.
“In place of a tacit acceptance of the modern system of borders, we argue for border abolition as a vital but underused treatment in the repertoire of medical intervention,” the article states. “Outlining the rights of people to stay and to move, and drawing on lessons from the prison abolition movement, we offer policies and practices towards a ‘no borders’ system that privileges liberatory solidarity with migrants by explicitly challenging global infrastructures that drive displacement.”