Drugs and Popular Culture

Paul Manning

• Publisher: Willan
• Year: 2013
• eBook ISBN: 9781134012183
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Criminology
• Index: Social Sciences

The use of illegal drugs is so common that a number of commentators now refer to the 'normalisation' of drug consumption. It is surprising, then, that to date very little academic work has explored drug use as part of contemporary popular culture. This collection of readings will apply an innovatory, multi-disciplinary approach to this theme, combining some of the most recent research on 'the normalisation thesis' with fresh work on the relationship between drug use and popular culture. In drawing upon criminological, sociological and cultural studies approaches, this book will make an important contribution to the newly emerging field positioned at the intersection of these disciplines. The particular focus of the book is upon drug consumption as popular culture. It aims to provide an accessible collection of chapters and readings that will explore drug use in popular culture in a way that is relevant to undergraduates and postgraduates studying a variety of courses, including criminology, sociology, media studies, health care and social work.

Part 1

Context, Theory and History

Introduction

Paul Manning

In an episode of the television drama Shameless, broadcast on Channel Four in February 2006, Lip, one of the main young characters seeks relief from his relationship troubles in the familiar pub of the series. Leaning wearily across the bar he orders a pint of lager, a whisky chaser and an ‘E’ from the barman who supplements his pub wages with a little local drug dealing. This is interesting for two reasons: firstly, because it portrays a picture of routine, normalised but illegal, recreational drug use which is not so very far removed from the everyday lived realities of many ‘ordinary’ young people in the UK today. Customers may not be able to order recreational drugs from the counter in pubs yet, but they are quite likely to be on sale somewhere near the bar. And secondly, it is interesting for the point that within the show this scene is presented as a fleeting, mundane moment of little consequence. Other, much more exciting things happen to Lip in this episode and his consumption of lager, whisky and ecstasy is represented as little more significant than what he had for lunch.

Here, then, is popular television drama offering us a picture of normalised poly-drug use as routine, everyday life. And, of course, this is hardly an isolated example of the representation of drug use in popular culture. From cinema, through television and popular fiction, to contemporary popular music (Blake (Chapter 5), Carter (Chapter 9) and Esan (Chapter 11) in this volume), the imagery of widespread drug consumption has, itself, become normalised. Even the moralising British daily red-top newspapers appear almost as frequently to condone as to condemn celebrity ‘soft drug’ use. In short, the media institutions that circulate and reproduce commodified forms of popular culture are very much more comfortable in dealing with themes of drug consumption than in previous decades. It is tempting to attribute this to important changes in ‘real’, lived popular culture: perhaps more films and television dramas feature drug consumption because more people see drug use as a normalised pattern of consumption. Measham and Brain (2005) point to a new ‘culture of intoxication’, suggesting that both alcohol and illegal drug use are now much more central elements in the dance and club cultures supported by the expanding commercial leisure industry of the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. Indeed, some critics point to the part played by the alcohol and club-based leisure industries in marketing, promoting and implicitly fostering this ‘culture of intoxication’ (Blake in Chapter 5 of this volume; Measham and Bain 2005). However, it is important to retain the distinction between representations of drug use through media and cultural institutions, and the cultural practices of those actually consuming drugs. In other words, an examination of the place of drug consumption in popular culture involves a consideration of both mainstream media representations and the ‘real’ cultural practices of ordinary people.

This volume brings together contributions from 15 different authors, who approach the relationship between drug use and popular culture from distinct disciplinary positions, including sociology, criminology, cultural studies, media studies and film studies. The approach is, thus, inter-disciplinary in bringing together contributions from these distinct disciplines, but it is hoped that this produces more than simply a collection of discrete papers. There is a coherence in that each discipline helps to illuminate the ways in which representations of drug consumption are mediated and the ways in which the cultural practices of drug consumption are reproduced through the micro-politics of daily life.

Licit and illicit drug consumption have always been lived elements of popular culture and, for that reason, have always provided subject matter for popular cultural texts. However, the approaches within this volume help us to explore the extent to which the popular cultural practices associated with drug consumption, and their mediated representations, have shifted from the sub-cultural to the mainstream. While there are some differences in approach and emphasis, the various contributions to this volume share a number of key assumptions. Firstly, there is, of course, the view that drug consumption is a popular cultural practice and that its mediations through society are of importance. For example, the very distinction between licit and illicit drugs is maintained through cultural definitions that are socially and politically administered. That, in some cases, these distinctions blur or erode, is itself, further confirmation of their cultural nature. Secondly, while by no means all explicitly embracing the vocabulary of this analysis, in practice, all the approaches within this volume tell us something about the symbolic frameworks within which patterns of drug consumption are framed or understood. These symbolic frameworks construct particular substances in particular ways, by associating such substances with certain social groups or identities rather than others, and by mobilising particular forms of language, and symbolism (Manning 2006 and Manning in this volume). Each of these chapters makes a contribution to understanding how and why these symbolic frameworks are reproduced and how they change, through processes of representation in television, cinema, newspapers and other media, or by examining the place of these symbolic frameworks in popular culture and everyday life. More work needs to be done, particularly of an ethnographic kind, in terms of exploring the ways in which media representations of drugs and the understandings of drug consumption, constructed at the micro-level in the course of everyday life, may intersect. But an approach that places the construction of symbolic frameworks, through mainstream media, and in the course of daily life at the micro level, has a lot of potential for future enquiry.

Another common assumption underpinning the approaches here is that the symbolic frameworks of drug consumption or substance misuse are historically specific and historically rooted. The language, symbols, imagery and associations with particular social identities that make up these symbolic frameworks, all have histories. They are a product, in part, of the exertion of power at specific historical moments, but also through the contests and skirmishes involving those ‘at the bottom’ as popular culture serves as a site of resistance to subordination. Andrew Blake in Chapter 2 provides an account of the imperialist pressures and colonial discourses at play in the construction of the discourses around opium and cannabis use in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. This story is picked up and developed through the twentieth century as a backdrop to Simon Cross' analysis of confused public debate over cannabis classification (Chapter 7). As Andrew Blake underlines, in this imperial history, we find the roots of a number of powerful symbols and discourses, that are still at play and continue to contribute to contemporary symbolic frameworks. This chapter demonstrates very clearly the ways in which medical and political, as well as popular discourses generated symbolic frameworks that often racialised drug consumption and these frameworks surfaced, and re-surfaced, not only in official policy documents but in popular culture – nineteenth century novels and twentiety century cinema, the fiction of Dickens and Fleming, together with films about Fu Manchu. Significantly, this chapter also points to the cultural significance, during this historical period, of drug paraphernalia – the equipment or technology of consumption. The symbolism of the equipment, as well as the substances, is an important component of each symbolic framework of ‘substance misuse’.

The first chapter in Part 1, however, provides a review of the main attempts to theorise the relationship between drug consumption and popular culture. It discusses the movement away from understanding drug consumption as a symptom of individual ‘weakness’, that characterised many of the most important approaches in the inter-war and immediate post-war years. Drug users at this time were often theorised as being in the grip ‘forces’ either located within the weak individual (moral weakness, psychological flaws, for example), or externally and signified by the inability of weak individuals to adjust to their social circumstances, if facing the ‘blocked opportunities’ typical of working class life. However, by the end of the twentieth century, there are very significant theoretical shifts that take account of the growing importance of consumption within popular culture, and of the centrality of media in contemporary social formations. If consumption and popular culture now occupy positions at the heart of late modern capitalism, then drug consumption is a further extension of the same cultural practices. If identity is invested in the things we consume, it is possible to see ‘drug styles’ (individual patterns of choice) in the context of the self-narratives individuals construct to make sense of themselves and their locations. These drug consumers are not necessarily either passive or weak. The constraints or possibilities of class, or gender, locality or ethnicity, have not disappeared. But contemporary social theory sees the development of ‘drug styles’ as part of the way in which individuals negotiate their experience of these structures to construct their own narratives. The remaining chapters in this book continue to prompt the intriguing questions: ‘do the symbolic frameworks’ mediated by mainstream or ‘micro’ media provide some of the resources whereby individuals use to think how they ‘frame’ different substances, who or what identities they associate those substances with, and how they choose to consume them.

References and suggested reading

Boyd, S. (2002) ‘Media Constructions of Illegal Drugs, Users, and Sellers: A Closer Look at Traffic’, The International Journal of Drugs Policy, 13: 397–407.

Manning, P. (2006) ‘There's No Glamour in Glue: News and the Symbolic Framing of Substance Misuse’, Crime Media Culture, 2 (1), April 2006.

Measham, F. and Brain, K. (2005): ‘“Binge” Drinking, British Alcohol Policy and the New Culture of Intoxication’, Crime Media Culture, 1(3), December 2005.

Mignon, P. (1993) ‘Drugs and Popular Music: The Democratisation of Bohemia’, Popular Cultural Studies, 1: 175–191.

Shapiro, H. (2002) ‘From Chaplin to Charlie – Cocaine, Hollywood and the Movies’, Drugs: Prevention Education and Policy, 9 (2): 132–141.

Stevenson, J. (1999) Addicted: The Myth and Menace of Drugs in Films. New York: Creation Books.

1. An introduction to the theoretical approaches and research traditions

Paul Manning

Introduction

Early social and cultural theoretical approaches tended to focus either upon the ‘real’ social practices within drug consuming subcultures, or upon the ways in which drug consumption was represented or mis-represented in media coverage. Less attention was given to the, possibly quite subtle, relationships between each of these dimensions. Thus, for example, ‘classical’ moral panic theory has tended to begin with discussions of mainstream media representations, and to move from these to potential impacts upon policing, policy making or spectacular forms of deviancy amplification. But the rapidly changing media landscape of the twenty-first century seems too complex for unamended or ‘classical’ moral panic theory. Some critics question whether an overriding concern with ‘mainstream media’ is so relevant to an age in which many members of the public (including, of course, younger, potential drug consumers) gather so much of their information from ‘less mainstream’, media sources, such as fanzines, the music press, and electronic sources (McRobbie and Thornton 1995). And secondly, to offer models of ‘media essentialism’ which locate problems entirely in terms of media representation and not at all in terms of ‘real’ behaviours seems equally problematic (Murji 1998; Schlesinger 1990).

Significantly for the concerns of this book, the more recent criminological and sociological work on patterns of drug use has found it important to take account of the cultural and media contexts within which drug consumption occurs. Thus, for example, Measham, Aldridge and Parker (2001) locate contemporary recreational drug use within the context of dance culture and its antecedents in earlier youth subcultural forms, while Hammersley, Khan and Ditton (2002) include an extended discussion of perceptions held by their respondents of the media and symbolic representation of drugs, alongside data on patterns of use. The wider media effects debate is beyond the concerns of this volume. However, one of the assumptions underpinning the approaches in this book is that while media and symbolic representations of drug consumption and drug users should be distinguished from the actual social and cultural practices of drug use, it is important to acknowledge the possible interplays between the two. Such interplays are likely to be complex and certainly not mono-causal. For example, Hammersley, Khan and Ditton report that many of their ecstasy using respondents claimed to despise mainstream media representations of drug use and yet, ‘a surprisingly large’ number of these respondents indicated that they relied upon media rather than friends for their drug information (2002: 116). An equally complex picture is painted by Jenkins’ study of ‘designer drugs’ in the US. Jenkins notes, on the one hand, growing public scepticism with regard to the more lurid drug scare stories circulated in the news media because an increasing proportion of the news audience has direct or indirect experience of drug use against which it can assess news media claims (1999: 18–19). And yet,...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Full Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Notes on contributors
• Part 1 Context, Theory and History
• Part 2 Considering the ‘Normalisation Thesis’
• Part 3 Representing Drugs in and as Popular Culture
• Part 4 Identities, Cultural Practices and Drugs
• Part 5 Drugs, Normalisation and Popular Culture: Implications and Policy
• Index