Thinking Beyond ‘outbreak’: the Contentious Politics of the Science of Early Warning and Overdose Epidemic

This Commentary on the article, “Early warnings and slow deaths: A sociology of outbreak and overdose” by Tim Rhodes and Kari Lancaster, reflects upon rapid response reflexes invoked in societal responses to ‘emergency,’ ‘epidemic,’ ‘crisis,’ and disasters, all of  which require immediate action with no time to think. Epidemiology has given us machines for producing ‘fact’ about the ‘opioid overdose epidemic’ that promote the forgetting of the ways in which apparatuses of social control enact the production of facticity. While facts are supposed to be epistemologically reliable and worthy, the work of Rhodes and Lancaster invites us to de-subscribe to these beliefs and re-member our way towards developing slower, more thorough, and more thoughtful ways of seeing a wider array of “indicators, signals, evidence, and narratives of an ecological kind” (Rhodes and Lancaster 2023; this issue). This Commentary focuses on the practices of ‘early warning’ in social, political, and economic context.