“Once again, a meth lab exploded and somebody died”: Narratives of volatility and risk in the rural drug war

Abstract

Methamphetamine (“meth”) has received a massive amount of media attention in the United States over the last decade. In reporting, journalists, politicians, and police commonly link meth to widespread risk, violence, criminality, and rural decay. Although the rise in meth use, addiction, and crime has been largely overstated, such imagery legitimizes an expansion of surveillance and policing to rural landscapes. In this research, I examine the way meth and meth makers are represented in case coverage of a meth lab fire sited in upstate New York. I find that reporters narrate a more general meth lab “social problem formula story” with caricature villains (meth makers), victims (community members), and heroes (law enforcement and legislators). Significantly, this model of storytelling conveys a distorted and exaggerated understanding of meth as a social problem, turning the atypical meth lab case into the “typical,” while legitimizing law and order solutions. In contributing to the contemporary “methamphetamine imaginary,” this formula story forgoes a structural analysis that considers the prevailing global drug war, rural poverty, or broader capital inequality.

Ice towns: Television representations of crystal methamphetamine use in rural Australia

“…Scholars have also documented direct connections between intense media coverage of the ‘ice epidemic’, politics and the way drug policy changes are inextricably bound up in neo-liberalism (see, for example, Lancaster et al, 2014; Taylor, 2008; Wakeman, 2014). This reporting, Revier (2017: 3) argues, ‘supports a larger project of state expansion in an ongoing drug war against people, populations, and territories’.…”

“…In all three programmes analysed here, the representation of small-town responses to ice focus tightly on widespread knowledge and individual experience of the drug, collective fear of a common threat and banding together in response. This lens empowers all three television news features to project responsibility for a widespread social problem onto affected rural families and communities, rather than provide a structural analysis of changing social, economic and environmental factors, or attempt to trace the local impact of ice through to networks of global drug production and distribution (Revier, 2017).…”

“…Martin distinguishes the impact of the small-town experience from big city drug problems by observing that in the bush, ‘everybody knows someone who’s been hurt’. Programme 3 also deploys tropes found in media coverage of North America’s rural crystal meth ‘epidemic’ (Revier, 2017), including ‘before-and-after’ portraits of users (‘this is your face on meth’) and reporting the heavy-handed policing to demonise users and frame ice as a risk to entire small-town communities. Before-and-after images are designed to shock audiences and act as a visual deterrent.…”

“…These statistics are concerning and go some way to explaining why journalists focus on the rural dimensions of ice use, but they do not tell the whole story of how this drug is positioned in relation to rurality by Australian news media. While North American scholars have investigated the use of rurality in mediated representations of the drug (see, for example, Boyd and Carter, 2010;Linnemann, 2010Linnemann, , 2016Linnemann and Wall, 2013;Revier, 2017), there remains a paucity of Australian research on the topic. So too, the previous studies have tended to focus their analyses on print news reporting.…”

“Now you’re connected”: Carceral visuality and police power on MobilePatrol

“…Most wanted profiles and neighborhood reports on suspicious activity make visible the hidden criminal figure desired for state apprehension. To use an example particularly relevant to the region, this occurs when police warn of dangerous meth makers, operating volatile meth labs in otherwise safe neighborhoods (Revier, 2017). Such concern produces, as Travis Linnemann (2016: 120) argues, states of emergency demanding ongoing state-led intervention.…”