Drug Scare Research Articles

‘Zombies’, ‘cannibals’, and ‘super humans’: a quantitative and qualitative analysis of UK news media reporting of the cathinone psychostimulants labelled ‘monkey dust’

Background News media helps set the agenda for public thinking and policy responses to drugs use, by framing substances, substance use and people who use drugs (PWUD) within a ‘drug scare’ narrative. Using the example of ‘monkey dust’, an inconsistently identified set of substituted cathinone psychostimulants, we explored how an emerging drug ‘problem’ was reported in the UK news media, and what this tells us about prevailing attitudes towards substance use and PWUD. Methods A quantitative and qualitative analysis of UK news media (n = 368 articles) representations of ‘monkey dust’ was conducted, and the underlying discourses identified. Findings Monkey dust reporting met the criteria of a drug scare, which was predominantly underpinned by discourses of criminality and legality. An unrepresentative, somewhat distorted, incomplete and simplified account of monkey dust as new and dangerous, and as requiring urgent legislative action, was provided. PWUD were dehumanised, criminalised, and stigmatised and the complexities of use, and responses other than those that fell within the status quo, obscured. Conclusions To prevent the negative impact such reporting may have on PWUD, it is important that relevant stakeholders, including advocacy groups, academics, and researchers, work with journalists to change the way drug use and PWUD are reported.

“Devil’s Lure Took All I Had”: Moral Panic and the Discursive Construction of Crystal Methamphetamine in Australian News Media

Crystal methamphetamine (“ice”) has been a fixture in Australian newspapers since the early 2000s. This study explores discourses at work in constructing the ice “problem” in recent Australian media, possible implications for how people who use ice are discursively positioned, and the resulting significance for drug policy. Twenty-seven articles were selected for discourse analysis, sampled from a larger study of Australian ice-related news items. By critically engaging with sociological concepts of “moral panic” and the “risk society,” we demonstrate how three media discourses produce the subject of the “young person” as both victimized by ice and a catastrophic threat in and of themselves: (1) “ice traps and transforms youth,” (2) “ice does not discriminate,” and (3) “ice perverts sanctuary.” These discourses illustrate the tensions between the meanings of ice use and understandings of safety and risk, speaking to current anxieties in Western, neoliberal societies. Ice use is further constructed as a form of abjection, threatening traditional social boundaries and institutions. However, the agency and determinism simultaneously granted to ice the substance troubles the notion we are witnessing yet another “drug scare” that polices social behavior. Instead, we observe how these discourses mirror those in the biomedical literature, which construct ice as a uniform, agentic, and uniquely dangerous drug. With use attributed to entrapment and/or naturalized as addiction, the drug is constituted as engineering its own, always harmful, consumption. This limits conceptions of any “safer,” “rational,” or “pleasurable” forms of ice use and further justifies state intervention on its users. Overall, these discourses rationalize prohibitionist interventions around ice and singularize drug consumption as a behavior requiring institutional management.

Meth Mouth, White Trash, and the Pseudo-Racialization of Methamphetamine Use in the U.S.

ABSTRACTDrug scares have historically been created for a range of purposes and with a variety of effects in the United States. Moral panics evoked by these drug scares either support or challenge dominant American ideas about race, economics, and society. In the present study, we examined newspaper accounts of methamphetamine use in the Inland Pacific Northwest of the United States in an effort to understand how the “reality” of the “meth epidemic” is socially constructed in a “meth hotspot,” and reflect upon the ways that the discourse of Whiteness intersects with this construction. For our analysis, we are cognizant of the “slipperiness” of the logic of Whiteness as a concept, and the ways that an alternative logic is articulated – one that strategically embraces or distances White drug users to support notions of White dominance. We focus on the possibility that individual meth users could then be portrayed pseudo-racially as “White trash,” and thus rendered outside the logic of White racial order. Our findings center on two main themes: (1) the use of fear in the construction of the meth drug scare through the sensationalization of meth, its anthropomorphization, and the depiction of the threat of the White drug user; and (2) how the logic of Whiteness is discursively reconciled within this construction. Given current mediated discourses about drug use and health in the United States that center on the emergence of the White drug user as the face of the opioid crisis, we are well served to carefully consider the recent historical precedence of the “meth epidemic” in which the public was faced with reconciling their views about drug use and the intersection of race, class, and mainstream American identity.

Attitudes towards Heroin Addicts and Addiction in Inter-War Greece

This article concentrates on the ‘drug scare’ caused by the introduction of heroin to Greece in the inter-war period. It will first retrace the story of heroin’s introduction into the Greek drug scene and assess the reasons for its speedy diffusion among drug users. Following this, it will examine some central themes in the discourse on drugs and heroin in particular, such as the actual or projected harm caused to individuals, society, or the nation as a whole. Then the focus will shift to perceptions of heroin and its users, considering broader debates which circulated in Greek inter-war society, for example, the country’s identity and its position within two parallel and interrelated conceptual frameworks: traditional vs. modern and ‘East’ vs. ‘West’. The paper will conclude by addressing drug users’ self-representations that were influenced, to a certain degree, by the prevailing approaches to drug addiction.

Virtually a drug scare: Mephedrone and the impact of the Internet on drug news transmission

BackgroundOn the 16th April 2010 the drug mephedrone was outlawed in the UK. This followed news media reports of deaths linked to the drug. In many respects the mephedrone scare represented a familiar pattern of drug framing and legislative reaction. However, the mephedrone scare took place in the era of online news transmission. MethodsTo quantify the mephedrone scare the Google Internet search-engine's Trends and News applications were monitored from when the first death was attributed to the drug until 1 year after it was banned. ResultsWeb interest in buying mephedrone peaked when online news stories reported deaths from the drug. Eighteen alleged mephedrone deaths were identified from online news. The fatalities which received the most Internet traffic subsequently proved false-alarms. Online interactive media widened access to alternative explanations of these alleged mephedrone deaths. ConclusionIt is contended that the advent of the Internet accelerated and inflated the mephedrone scare, but also that online media allowed [web] user-generated information transmission, rather than simple dissemination by news media to audience, fostering competing discourses to stock drug scare themes as they emerged.

Methamphetamine and its impact on the criminal justice system: a three-year examination of felony drug filings

Much of the knowledge available on the impact of methamphetamine on crime is limited to treatment populations, self-report surveys, methamphetamine laboratory seizures, and anecdotal statistics. In many ways methamphetamine has been viewed by the public as the next great drug scare, equal to or even more dangerous than the crack scare of the late 1980s. There is little hard data, however, on the extent of methamphetamine's impact on the criminal justice system in individual communities. This article examines three years of felony drug filings in Mesa County, Colorado, a community that has been hard hit by methamphetamine over a 15-year period. More than 1100 methamphetamine arrests were made in the three years of the study, but virtually none of those arrests were for methamphetamine laboratory seizures. The study reports on the results of a felony drug-tracking system in a District Attorney's office, and provides both a demographic profile of methamphetamine arrestees and comparison of methamphetamine cases with other drugs. The study illustrates the impact of disruptions in Mexican drug trafficking organizations on local methamphetamine supply and demand, and demonstrates how changes in local law enforcement drug interdiction practices influence arrest statistics.

Between Coca and Cocaine: A Century or More of U.S.-Peruvian Drug Paradoxes, 1860–1980

Between Coca and Cocaine: A Century or More of U.S.-Peruvian Drug Paradoxes, 1860–1980

On the Vanguard of the First Drug Scare

This article examines how newspapers portrayed cheap distilled spirits, known as gin, and the people who drank it in eighteenth-century London. It shows that coverage did not coincide with movements in consumption; rather, coverage peaked with the passage of the Gin Act of 1736 and then declined and disappeared altogether just as consumption reached new heights in the early 1740s. Coverage then resumed in January 1751, by which time consumption was already in decline. Despite the fact that coverage and consumption did not move in tandem, there is little evidence to suggest that newspapers contributed to the making of a moral panic over gin and its supposed effects on the health, morals, and productivity of the working poor. In the 1730s, at least, newspapers were divided on the subject of gin; in the early 1750s, by contrast, the press was unanimous in its condemnation of gin, but, as in the 1730s, it generally avoided running sensational stories.

A design for strife: alcopops, licit drug — familiar scare story

In Scotland during the mid 1990s the news media began reporting growing concern about a new form of alcoholic beverage known as ‘alcopops’. Fears raised by the press centred on the claim that these drinks were being marketed towards young children and as such were responsible for the rising levels of adolescent drunkenness. In focusing on underage consumption and alleged marketing aimed at children, the press portrayed alcopops use as illicit, allowing these drinks to be reported as if they were an illegal drug. This ‘negative’ publicity was in contrast to the ‘positive’ stories and advertising space given over to other alcoholic beverages elsewhere in their pages. This manuscript quantifies the volume of reporting of these drinks in the Scottish press over the life-span of their news-worthiness. It argues that the press's claims could not be supported by the realities of underage drinking at the time. When this became apparent the scare story ended as rapidly as it had begun. Though concerning a licit substance these findings were found to have many illuminating parallels with illegal drug scare stories.

In another city, in another time: rhetoric and the creation of a drug scare in eighteenth-century London

In another city, in another time: rhetoric and the creation of a drug scare in eighteenth-century London

Whatever Happened to ICE? The Latest Drug Scare

A potent form of methamphetamine — “ice” — gained national notoriety in 1989. Smoked in a pipe, the high from ice was said to last from four to twenty-four hours, and prolonged use led to paranoid schizophrenia. Its reputed popularity in the state of Hawaii led a host of local, state, and federal officials to issue grave warnings about the threat this drug posed to a nation already weary from the ravages of crack. Although federal officials in early 1990 backed away from this portent of doom, such claims were tenuous at best given a complete lack of evidence. A small sample of eighteen ice users in San Francisco revealed significant impediments to the adoption of this drug there. Variable drug use patterns and user preferences were the two most significant factors inhibiting the widespread acceptance of ice into the San Francisco drug-using scene.

Saying No to Ron and Nancy: School-Based Drug Abuse Prevention Programs in the 1980S

The paper questions the individualism inherent in many prevention programs and argues that the recent drug scare has intensified some programs' social control functions. Responding to pressure from corporations and the breakdown of traditional socializing agencies, schools have assumed greater responsibility for students' moral behavior. Through drug abuse prevention programs in particular, schools have encouraged the accumulation of social skills as a means to ensure success, and they have increasingly applied authoritarian sanctions along with psychological manipulations in an attempt to regulate student behavior. This paper suggests an alternative model for drug abuse prevention along the lines of Paolo Freire's and Ira Shor's dialogical education.

Different strokes: Models of drug abuse prevention education

Since the beginning of the youthful drug scare in the 196Os, millions of dollars of federal, state, municipal, school district, and private agency money have been spent in thousands of drug abuse prevention education programs across the nation. Recent reviews of the literature (Braucht, Follingstad, Brakarsh, & Berry, 1973b; World Health Organization, 1973; Randall & Wong, 1974) have come up with the same conclusion; there is little substantiated evidence that drug abuse education programs have any lasting effect on the drug using behavior of the clients. Furthermore, there is no evidence that speaks to the question, “What kinds of drug education programs have what kinds of effects on what kinds of people?” Instead of well evaluated, theoretically grounded programs, what has emerged is a large and varied number of approaches, all seemingly unaware of their philosophical proclivities, which have operated without clearly stated goals. Much criticism can be excused on the grounds that most attempts at drug education are recent; the true road to salvation, if one exists, is not well paved, nor clearly lighted. The time is ripe, however, for a systematic analysis of the underlying assumptions and philosophical perspectives indicated by the literature. This paper will first delineate models of drug abuse prevention education’ that seem to be indicated by the literature of the past 6 years. The second part of the paper is devoted to discussion of the research related to each model. Each of nine models will be considered according to: (a) its basic premises; (b) positive and negative salient criticisms; and (c) implications and modes of application for drug abuse prevention education. In order, the models that will be considered are: (1) the Legal-Political Model; (2) the Fear Induction Model; (3) the Medical, Psychiatric Model; (4) the Psycho-Social, Human Skills Model; (5) the Information Processing, Rationality Model; (6) the Reinforcement Model; (7) the Religious and Spiritual Model; (8) the Assumed Drive Model; and (9) the Alternatives Model.