Anthony Bourdain has never been shy about his history of drug addiction. Now more than ever, he is incensed about the opioid pandemic sweeping rural and small-town America, which the Parts Unknown host and Appetites co-author sees as a notable factor in Donald Trump’s election. At 60, the iconic epicurean worshipped by coastal-dwelling foodies has emerged as an outspoken defender of Americans battling addiction. “When did we decide it was okay to write all these people off?” he asks. With little prompting, he launches into a fiery, thoughtful rant about our broken pharmaceutical industry. (In our short conversation, we also talk about food snobbery and George Orwell.)

Anthony Bourdain: Look, large corporations track their sales very carefully. If you’re pumping in millions of highly addictive narcotic pills to one tiny little town, or one tiny little state, you know what you’re doing. There’s no question, okay? In what way are they different from some corner boy in Baltimore slinging dope? I have a little more sympathy for the corner boy than I do for some billionaire, who’s already doing quite well, knowingly selling narcotics far and above any reasonable or acceptable level of need.

Now that the number of prescriptions has dropped, under pressure, these same companies are looking internationally, for the same kinds of markets in countries like Cyprus. They’re targeting places that are less familiar with Oxycontin-style problems and selling them the same line of bullshit that they sold America so effectively. So I think it’s egregious.

Now that the white captain of the football team and his cheerleader girlfriend in small-town America are hooked on dope, maybe we’ll now stop demonizing heroin as a criminal problem and start dealing with it as the medical and public-health problem that it is, and should be.

GQ: Your 2014 Parts Unknown episode on rural and small-town America’s heroin and opioid epidemic—and ultimately the mass incarceration of black people—made for some intensely moving television. These pharmaceutical-company executives are dope dealers, and they should be treated worse and more roughly than dope dealers. You’ve got some disadvantaged black kid. You’re working in a one-company town, and that company happens to be a street gang selling heroin.

The kind of pressures, the limited choices that you have, it’s understandable. David Simon talks about this. That’s a hard situation to deal with in an enforcement model. But when you’re talking about billionaire and millionaire executives at pharmaceutical companies, these are people with something to lose if threatened with jail. Frog-march them out of their door in suburbia, handcuffed and surrounded by DEA officers, with their children and neighbors watching. I think you’d start seeing some real behavioral change if you started putting them through that same system, as we’ve been putting young black men for years.

There's a quote from Toni Morrison on Bush and Cheney that I'd like to read you. “This is precisely the time when artists go to work. There is no time for despair, no place for self-pity, no need for silence, no room for fear. We speak, we write, we do language. That is how civilizations heal.” As a fierce critic of Trumpism, is that a viewpoint you might agree with?

I wish I could believe that, honestly. I think I have a more glum worldview. I think the role of the artist is to make art. To put on paper, or in whatever medium, what is in their heart, however ugly or beautiful that might be. The role of the artist is to fulfill or to listen to that compulsion within them. And do the best they can to satisfy that. Art is a very personal and selfish endeavor most times. As much as I find art beautiful and often helpful to a society, I don’t think it necessarily has to play that role. I think art has a disruptive element, even a destructive element. There’s room for all of those things.