The haunting spectacle of crystal meth: A media-created mythology?

Abstract

For over a decade the media have been reporting in alarmist tones that 'crystal meth is coming' to the UK. Using clichéd discourse ('crazed', 'epidemic', 'horror', etc.) and visual images of deformed and disfigured faces, the meanings attached to the drug are clear: crystal meth creates dangerous 'others'. Yet an identifiable crystal meth problem has hitherto failed to materialise, and press reporting of the issue appears to constitute an exemplary case of what Stuart Hall has described as a double movement within ideological discourse: a movement towards propaganda and a movement towards myth. This article examines how the threat of 'ice', as it is commonly known, has been symbolically, aesthetically and textually constructed in the British media, and how this representation has created its own hyper-reality, influencing political debate, drug policy and public reaction. The analysis places particular emphasis on the importance of visual images as a sensory expression of cultural meaning, an aspect of media representation that has too often been theoretically and pragmatically neglected within mainstream criminology.

Prohibition, privilege and the drug apartheid: The failure of drug policy reform to address the underlying fallacies of drug prohibition

“…Media representations frame d ugs as causing; petty crime (Salkeld, 2009); serious crime (Stretch, 2014); organised crime (Daily Mail, 2013); mental illness (Byrne, 2011); psychosis (Bloom, 2014); and physical and moral decay (Ayres and Jewkes, 2012) and wrongly presents drug use as a significant causal factor in a range of societal problems including: car accidents (Romano et al, 2014); workplace accidents (Price, 2014); disease (Ceste, 2010);…”

Moving beyond the other

“…Such studies emphasised the need to advance our understanding of the sociocultural place of drug use whilst simultaneously warning of the pitfalls of developing ill-considered policy responses fuelled by anxiety, myth and fallacy. The themes of these works have influenced generations of scholars, leading to an increasingly robust narrative of the socio-cultural place of drug use and drug users (Aldridge et al, 2011;Askew, 2013;Williams, 2013) and critiques of the sociopolitical construction of drug use (Ayres and Jewkes, 2012;Alexandrescu, 2014) and the spurious nature of drug policy (Boland, 2008;Silverman, 2012).…”

“…It has been argued that governmental discourse around drug consumption is 'characterised by compulsion, pain and pathology ' (O'Malley and Valverde, 2004: 26) whilst the mainstream media compound this ideology with negative stereotypical representations of drug users (UKDPC, 2010). Indeed, a consistent theme in political rhetoric (Taylor, 2011), media reporting (Ayres and Jewkes, 2012) and drugs education (McInnes and Barrett, 2007) is the omnipresent threat of danger and the framing of drug use as an outsider activity, undertaken by a threatening group of drug using others.…”

“…At the centre of this discourse is the process of 'othering'; the identification and marginalisation of particular substances and substance users who are posited as dangerous and a risk to normative society (Ayres and Jewkes, 2012). This process has its origins in the moral entrepreneurship of drug scares which have historically legitimised the evolution of ever more punitive drug policies through constructions of 'the other' (Reinarman, 1994).…”

‘Crossing the line’: Criminological expertise, policy advice and the ‘quarrelling society’

“…It has been fleetingly mentioned in relation to media constructions of drug-related issues (Lancaster et al 2010;Ayers and Jewkes 2012); as a footnote providing evidence of the power of politics over evidence (Rock 2010) and as a symbolic and inauspicious end to New Labour's drug policy stance (Watson 2012). The under-consideration of the David Nutt case is an unfortunate oversight that this article begins to address as it provides a clarifying example of the muddied inter-relationship between evidence, policy, and law on one hand, and the blurring between moral beliefs, values and politics on the other.…”