‘Ethnobotanicals’ and ‘Spice zombies’: new psychoactive substances in the mainstream media (original) (raw)

Mephedrone, assassin of youth: The rhetoric of fear in contemporary drug scares

This article examines how mephedrone, the most popular legal high sold freely in the United Kingdom until its classification as a high-risk drug, in April 2010, was constructed by the British popular media as a moral epidemic that threatened the very symbolic heart of the nation – its youth. News of teenagers committing suicide after taking the drug or dying of overdose had been presented in the pages of tabloid dailies for months when the government decided to ban the substance despite the lack of solid scientific data on the medical and social risks it posed. Drawing on Teun van Dijk’s socio-cognitive approach to critical discourse studies, this article demonstrates how in its attempt to influence national policy the media largely responded to the new drug problem with panic discourses that perpetuated the old ‘war on drugs’ ideology, choosing to frame mephedrone as an agent of death and moral downfall even when its destructive influence was questionable. In this perspective, a blueprint made of multiple layers of historical drug scares and repressive drug policies shaped the metaphors and narratives used by the media to codify a sense of threat and by the audiences to interpret the symptoms of a social pathology.

" Someone Else's Problem " : New Psychoactive Substances in the Online Hungarian Media

Media monitoring is an important method to inform public health and prevention services about emerging health issues, such as new psychoactive substances (NPS). This study assessed the portrayal of NPS in online Hungarian media in 2015 using qualitative content analysis. Hungarian online media considers the dealer to be the main cause of drug use, which is portrayed as a problem for youth, poor people, minorities, and rural populations. The point of view of the articles is externalized, and so is the solution offered by them. From the perspective of the police or using a biomedical approach, the articles suggest that drug use is an individual (someone else’s) problem, and the perspectives of insiders (such as users or addiction treatment professionals) are absent. The media portrays low socioeconomic background and the hopelessness of disadvantaged rural and mostly minority populations as the roots of NPS use, and misses the pressing incapability of health care emergency and drug treatment services to cope with the problem. The dominant portrayal of police raids is rarely counterbalanced by voices of active or recovering drug users or professionals in addiction treatment and harm reduction, who could offer a systematic solution to the apparent rapid spread of NPS use.

Curiosity killed the M-cat: an examination of illicit drugs and the media

Using mainstream media communication theories, this article outlines different mechanisms by which media can impact on public perceptions of drugs and crime. The media can set the agenda and define public interest; frame issues through selection and salience; indirectly shape individual and community attitudes towards risk and norms; and feed into political debate and decision making. We demonstrate how the media can fulfill each of these roles by examining the so-called Miaow Miaow (Mephedrone) legal high 'epidemic', as reported in the United Kingdom news media from 2009-2010. In doing so we illustrate that by contributing to hysteria, exerting pressure for policy change and increasing curiosity in drug use, the media can have a potentially powerful impact on demand for drugs and public perceptions of illicit drugs and drugs policy.

What can we say about substance use? Dominant discourses and narratives emergent from Australian media

Addiction Research & Theory, 2008

Discourses are conceptualised as context-specific frameworks that constrain what can be presented as rational when considering psychoactive substances. Given the implications of this for Australian policy debate and development, research and health promotion, an integrative analysis explored the nature of the dominant discourses as they pertain to substance use. Newspaper articles spanning a 12-month period (April 2005(April -2006 were analysed with the analysis triangulated with visual media and newspapers from 5-years prior. We conclude that within Australia, psychoactive substance use is framed within the dominant discourses of medicine, morality, law, economics, politics and popular culture. The linguistic landscape circumscribed by each discourse is described and the power dynamics underpinning the maintenance of the discourses considered, with each discursive framework shown to delineate unique subject positions that define the numerous individuals concerned with substance use issues (e.g. substance users, politicians, medical experts, etc.).

Cultural ecstasies: Drugs, gender and the social imaginary (Book Review)

In Cultural Ecstasies, the fourth book in Ian Parker’s Concepts for Critical Psychology series, Ilana Mountian takes a deconstructionist approach to the review and examination of multiple discourses on drugs, drug users, policy and addiction. Mountian, a practising clinical psychologist and academic, aims to show in her book how these discourses (for example, those from religion, criminality and medicine), combined with key historical events, affect the diverse and often contradictory interpretations of drugs and drug users in circulation today, including gendered, raced and classed meanings.

The Politics of Subcultures Post-Cohen: A Postmodern Reading of Drug Culture in Contemporary Society

The New Birmingham Review, Dissertation Special Edition (2015)

This paper explores the debates around the framing of subversive groups and subcultures through an analysis of the discursive presentation of drugs and drug users and the role played by identity, power and hegemony in this process. Through an engagement with sociological theories of deviance - moral panics and drug scares - the piece explores the discursive methods through which marginalisation occurs. The wide scope of the subject matter calls for a broad approach to analysis; an engagement with the poststructuralist philosophy of Jacques Derrida informs the dismissal of claims to reason and common sense that dominate the drug debate and marginalisation debates in general. The application of poststructuralist discourse theories leads to a critical contestation of dominant discursive formations through the formation of alternative identities acting to subvert the methods through which marginalisation occurs. The paper posits that the application of a reconceptualised ‘radical, plural democracy’ and increased engagement with the internet as an unmediated public sphere can contribute to the expansion of opportunities for marginalised groups to counter the hegemonic discourses that act to suppress them.

Kronic hysteria: Exploring the intersection between Australian synthetic cannabis legislation, the media, and drug-related harm

The International journal on drug policy, 2013

Background: Having first appeared in Europe, synthetic cannabis emerged as a drug of concern in Australia during 2011. Kronic is the most well-known brand of synthetic cannabis in Australia and received significant media attention. Policy responses were reactive and piecemeal between state and federal governments. In this paper we explore the relationship between media reports, policy responses, and drug-related harm. Methods: Google search engine applications were used to produce time-trend graphs detailing the volume of media stories being published online about synthetic cannabis and Kronic, and also the amount of traffic searching for these terms. A discursive analysis was then conducted on those media reports that were identified by Google as 'key stories'. The timing of related media stories was also compared with selfreported awareness and month of first use, using previously unpublished data from a purposive sample of Australian synthetic cannabis users. Results: Between April and June 2011, mentions of Kronic in the media increased. The number of media stories published online connected strongly with Google searches for the term Kronic. These stories were necessarily framed within dominant discourses that served to construct synthetic cannabis as pathogenic and created a 'moral panic'. Australian state and federal governments reacted to this moral panic by banning individual synthetic cannabinoid agonists. Manufacturers subsequently released new synthetic blends that they claimed contained new unscheduled chemicals. Conclusion: Policies implemented within in the context of 'moral panic', while well-intended, can result in increased awareness of the banned product and the use of new yet-to-be-scheduled drugs with unknown potential for harm. Consideration of regulatory models should be based on careful examination of the likely intended and unintended consequences. Such deliberation might be limited by the discursive landscape.

Drawing Boundaries Between Risk and Danger Scenarios: Media Discourse on Illicit Drug Use.

The study points out a basic meaning-based and stylistic dichotomy between risk and danger scenarios in Finnish press reports on illicit drug use at a time when the country was experiencing a wave of increased drug use. The in-control recreational drug user"s situation is described from within a risk assessment position that is portrayed as demanding sophisticated self-management skills, whereas stories on populations of addicted heavy drug users are articulated in distanced descriptions of the policy measures required in order to govern the out-of-control. The article suggests that the risk scenarios hold a better cultural resonance due to a value climate that approves of autonomous self-managing individuals, who are capable of estimating risks and making rational choices accordingly. The reporting on drug use constitutes a striking example of a cultural articulation of competence versus non-competence.

Methamphetamine Discourse: Media, Law, and Policy

Canadian Journal of Communication, 2010

This article examines the emergence of methamphetamine use and production as a social problem in Canada, particularly through media discourse. Rather than confine our discussion to print media, we also examine news photographs and headlines as cultural products. In addition, we briefly discuss several drug scares and media campaigns in Canada in the nineteenth century to contextualize the "crystal meth scare." We discuss the tendency of contemporary newspaper articles, photographs and Internet sites about methamphetamine to reiterate conventional ideas about drugs and the people who use and produce them. Our analysis of print media and photos about methamphetamine centres on a special 2005 supplement to Vancouver newspaper The Province. Drawing from critical researchers whose analyses of media argue that news is a cultural product and that "law and order" is an important news category, we conclude with an examination of Canadian federal, provincial, and local responses to the crystal meth threat, which most often support law-and-order initiatives.