Drugs and Popular Culture in the Age of New Media

Paul Manning

• Publisher: Taylor & Francis
• Year: 2013
• eBook ISBN: 9781317974659
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Criminology
• Index: Social Sciences

This book examines the history of popular drug cultures and mediated drug education, and the ways in which new media - including social networking and video file-sharing sites - transform the symbolic framework in which drugs and drug culture are represented. Tracing the emergence of formal drug regulation in both the US and the United Kingdom from the late nineteenth century, it argues that mass communication technologies were intimately connected to these "control regimes" from the very beginning. Manning includes original archive research revealing official fears about the use of such mass communication technologies in Britain. The second half of the book assesses on-line popular drug culture, considering the impact, the problematic attempts by drug agencies in the US and the United Kingdom to harness new media, and the implications of the emergence of many thousands of unofficial drug-related sites.

1
Introduction

Cultures of Intoxication

This book is about the relationship between drugs and popular culture, but some wider themes provide the backdrop for the discussion. These themes include the arrival of ‘new media’; the continuing importance of ‘old’ media; the ways in which individuals navigate their way through the challenges that are presented to them by late modern capitalism; the ways in which individuals relate to each other within popular cultures; the parts that media play in the changing patterns of regulation and social control over intoxication and what happens when older hierarchies that used to organize ‘experts’ and ‘expert knowledge’ are destabilized by the accelerating and multiplying flows of information that have been produced by ‘new media’. It is a book that draws on several disciplines including sociology, cultural criminology, cultural studies and media studies, but what it seeks to do is to situate the study of the cultural practices of intoxication against the wider backdrop of profound change in the organization and workings of the media, from the ‘high modern’ age of mass communication in the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries to the arrival of the Internet and social media in the twenty-first century. The first half of the book concerns the part that ‘old media’ and mass mediated drugs education played in the regulation of popular drug cultures with a focus primarily upon Britain and the US whilst the second half considers how these changed with the emergence of ‘new media’, with a focus that extends a little beyond Britain and the US. This is the context in which governments, drugs agencies and ‘health managers’ now have to contemplate the value of mediated drugs education.

In his account of how ‘drugs acquired their modern meaning’ in the Britain of the Edwardian era (1992: 1), Kohn argues that discussions of drugs always served as conduit for the expression of the deeper social anxieties of Middle England. Half-jokingly he predicts that in an age in which Middle England had come to terms with sex before marriage, multiculturalism and women going out to work, drugs would lose their power to shock (1992: 183). Leaving aside the open question as to whether Middle England really has reconciled itself to these social changes, the argument here is that while intoxicative substances can never be divested of the social meanings and cultural association within which they are embedded, they might become more ‘normal’. Indeed, Musto (1999) argues that drugs have historically always had the power to signify particular cultural meanings, especially around identity, precisely because of the perceived need to control and ‘discipline’ communities known to be using them. The intimate relationship between substances, practices of intoxication, meaning and culture lies at the core of an important debate about contemporary trends in licit and illicit drug use and a brief rehearsal of the arguments involved will provide a helpful prologue to the subsequent argument in this book.

The Normalisation Debate

In 1959 it was possible for one social researcher to conclude that most working class adolescents in Britain avoided drugs and were barely acquainted even with the nomenclature of drug use.¹ There may be grounds for treating this conclusion with a degree of skepticism because, as we shall see in subsequent chapters, mediated popular culture has always circulated ideas and symbolic representations of drugs to wider audiences, during the 1950s and every other decade. However, in Britain it is also clear that the popular use of drugs accelerated hugely through the first wave of widespread drug consumption in the 1960s, the heroin ‘epidemic’ of the 1980s, and the ‘decade of dance’ in the 1990s (Measham et al., 2001). By the end of the 1990s it was possible for the researchers associated with one of the first longitudinal self-report studies of drug consumption amongst the young, the North-West Longitudinal Study (NWLS), to propose the ‘normalisation thesis’ which rested not only upon conclusions drawn from quantitative measures of drug exposure and use among young people in the North West of England but, importantly for this book, also argued that the ‘normalisation’ of drug use involved a ‘cultural accommodation’ in which the meaning of drug use moved from something associated with deviant subcultures on the margins of society to something that was familiar to a ‘normal’ majority in their routine everyday lives (Parker et al., 1998: 152). The authors here are not referring to opiates or ‘hard’ drugs but to ‘recreational’ drugs. The ‘normalisation thesis’ has provoked considerable debate and a particular critique offered by Shiner and Newburn (1997).

In the original ‘normalisation thesis’, Howard Parker, Judith Aldridge and Fiona Measham suggest that there are a set of specific observable dimensions through which ‘normalisation’ can be assessed. However, they are careful to emphasize that in their view ‘normalisation’ does not depend upon absolute measures of drug use, exposure or attitudinal change, but rather it is a relational concept that describes the extent to which drug use is embedded within popular everyday culture. This is an important point because the original Shiner and Newburn critique rests partly upon challenging the interpretation of the quantitative data produced by the first five years of the NWLS. The NWLS includes measures of both behavior and attitude and the first dimension refers to the availability of drugs. The data suggested that as young people grew older they became more exposed to drug availability: nearly 60 percent of fourteen year olds reported experience of ‘offer situations’ but by the time they were nineteen this figure rose to 91 percent (Parker et al., 1998: 83). The second dimension aimed to provide a measure of the extent to which young people might move from ‘offer situations’ to ‘trying a drug’. At fourteen, 36.3 percent of these respondents reported ‘trying’ a drug, but by nineteen this figure had increased to 64.3 percent, with cannabis the most frequently cited choice (Parker et al.,1998: 83–84). The third dimension of normalisation according to Parker and colleagues was expressed through measures of regular use. Regularity of use is often captured in self-report surveys through questions on ‘in the last year’ and ‘in the last month’ usage. In the NWLS, at fourteen 20.4 percent of respondents reported use in the ‘last month’ and 30.9 percent in the ‘last year’, but at nineteen these figures had risen to 35.2 and 52.9 percent respectively (Parker et al., 1998: 85).

These are quantitative measures that the authors are quick to acknowledge have certain limitations. In particular, because of the erratic and episodic nature of adolescent behavior in so many aspects of their lives, including drug use, the ‘last month’ measure is often regarded as problematic by researchers. However, Parker and colleagues tried to supplement these measures with research techniques intended to capture more subtle and nuanced aspects of the ‘pathways’ traveled by these young people across the years from fourteen to eighteen. They distinguished ‘current users’, from ‘ex-triers’, those in ‘transition’ and ‘abstainers’ and spent time trying to capture attitudinal evidence through more qualitative research techniques. They found that even ‘abstainers’ were often quite ‘drugwise’, demonstrating an awareness of drug issues, and that most former users, prospective users, and even abstainers could recount ‘drug stories’ involving siblings, friends or acquaintances (Parker et al., 1998: 155). This is their fourth dimension of normalisation. A fifth dimension concerned the trajectory of these young people; their future intentions. In the past it had often been assumed that young people would simply grow out of drug use as they moved from adolescence to young adulthood. The first NWLS appeared to suggest that something very different was actually happening and that rather than abandoning regular drug use to take on the responsibilities of adult life, a significant number of the subjects in the NWLS intended to combine the two. The analysis of the ‘pathways’ suggested an increased velocity as young people neared their twenties, with 33 percent of former ‘triers’ now in transition toward ‘current use’ and 37 percent of those formerly in ‘transition’ now identified as ‘current users’.

This evidence suggested that ‘recreational’ drug use might be becoming a feature of routine everyday life for teenagers and young adults. This is the proposition at the heart of the ‘normalisation thesis’; that ‘recreational’ drug use should no longer be seen as something confined to and occurring within a deviant subculture located at the margins, but rather a familiar aspect of leisure time for young adults. Most striking for the authors was that social class and gender appeared not to influence drug use: the process of ‘normalisation’ seemed to be underlined by the extent to which young people from all sections of society and diverse social backgrounds appeared to be familiar with drug use. Cannabis was by far the most common drug, though amphetamines and LSD were tried at least once by over a quarter of the respondents, with lower figures for other drugs (Parker et al., 1998: 84).

In a later review of literature, the NWLS team argued that at the end of the 1990s and beginning of the 2000s, evidence suggested that while 10 to 15 percent of late adolescents were regular ‘recreational’ drug users this figure actually increased to 20 to 25 percent among young adults (Parker et al., 2002). The team also conducted a follow-up to the original NWLS in which 465 of the original 700 respondents were contacted again to provide a picture of what was happening as they moved into their early twenties. The follow-up found that availability was increasing, as measured by ‘offer’ situations; that lifetime ‘trying’ rates had increased from 36.3 percent of the sample at age fourteen to 75.8 percent at twenty two; that almost half the sample reported using cannabis in the last year, 16.2 percent reported using cocaine in the last year, 14.5 percent using ecstasy and 11 percent reported using amphetamines (2002: 954–955). Cannabis remained the ‘key drug’, however, with 25.8 percent of these twenty-two years olds reporting use in the last month.

In 2002, then, the NWLS team concluded that ‘“sensible” recreational drug use was continuing to be gradually further accommodated into the lifestyles of ordinary young Britons’ (Parker et al., 2002: 959). At the same time, a process of the criminalization of outdoor events, followed by the incorporation and commodification of raves in the early nineties, had led to the emergence of a burgeoning dance and club culture (Ward, 2010). The ‘twenty-somethings’ of the NWLS study were among the first beneficiaries of this significant expansion in the nighttime economy which the UK New Labour government hoped would drive urban regeneration in city centers. The NWLS team had already begun to focus upon this development and found that dance culture was characterized by an even higher pattern of poly-drug use in comparison with the respondents of the NWLS, with alcohol, cannabis, ecstasy featuring significantly in these new drug repertoires (Measham et al., 2001).

The ‘normalisation thesis’, then, suggested that in the first decade of the new century, ‘recreational’ drug use was becoming a familiar cultural practice in the mainstream of everyday life for teenagers and young adults. While only a sizeable minority regularly used drugs such as cannabis, most had ‘lifetime’ experience of one kind or another, and most knew friends or colleagues who were more regular users. In addition, the distinction between licit and illicit drugs was becoming blurred as the poly-drug styles of dance culture were sustained by clubs, where it was possible to easily secure both alcohol and ‘recreational’ drugs. But this picture was challenged by some other researchers, including Shiner and Newburn (1997) who argued that the normalisation thesis exaggerated the extent of drug use among young people, over-simplified the choices made by young people through the methodology employed and failed to fully explore the meanings that young people attached to drug use. Part of the critique rested upon questioning the interpretation of the quantitative data in the NWLS. Shiner and Newburn argued that while the evidence of a historic increase in drug use was not in dispute, even in the case of cannabis only a minority were at any particular moment regular or ‘last month’ users (1997: 515). Shiner and Newburn questioned whether the geographical area of the NWLS, which included parts of Manchester, was representative of the country as a whole, given that Manchester was the center of the early 1990s rave club scene. Other national surveys, they suggested, did not confirm the NWLS picture of such extensive drug use. Using their own data, generated through a much smaller scale qualitative study that evaluated peer-led drugs education, they tried to establish a distinction between ‘normalcy’ and ‘frequency’ (1997: 519). In other words, while young people might report quite frequently finding themselves in ‘offer’ situations, that did not necessarily mean that they approved of drug use or regarded it as ‘normal’. In conducting qualitative interviews with fifty-two young people they found a complexity in the accounts provided, particularly among those who had used drugs. The justification employed by some such as ‘everyone does it’ or the need to ‘keep in with friends’ pointed, according to Shiner and Newburn, to ‘classic neutralisation’ techniques whereby the deviant’s defense of their action implied a sense of guilt and actually confirmed their underlying commitment to mainstream values (1997: 524). In other words, even self-confessed drug users were conflicted in their attitudes and were actually uneasy about their drug use.

Other researchers also found the evidence more equivocal in other parts of the country. Wibberley and Price, for example, found that some, limited experience of using a drug, most frequently cannabis, was ‘not abnormal’ but that more regular use of drugs was ‘still much rarer than the use of alcohol’ and yet close to half the sample said that they would not be worried if a close friend of theirs was using cannabis (2000: 160). Denham Wright and Pearl (2000) in a longitudinal survey of school students in the West Midlands found a very rapid increase in the numbers who ‘knew someone who took drugs’, from 15 percent in 1969 to 65 percent in 1994, but then the trend reversed, dropping to 58 percent in 1999. On the other hand, by the end of the 1990s, Shapiro claimed that rave events were widely regarded as ‘a legitimate and lucrative arm of the leisure industry’, which effectively ‘normalised’ the use of ecstasy within the infrastructure of the nighttime economy, as ‘drug use increasingly becomes a fashion accessory…’ (1999: 32–33).

The NWLS team offered a defense of their work, which provides a helpful context for this book (Parker et. al. 2002). For them, normalisation has to be understood as ‘a multidimensional tool, a barometer of changes in social behaviour and cultural perspectives…’ (2002: 943). In other words, the value of the concept did not depend upon a quantitative demonstration of aggregates involved in drug use. Rather, the concept referred to dynamic processes of change in social behavior and culture. Cigarette smoking, they pointed out, could be said to have been normalised in earlier decades and yet actual cigarette smokers were only for a very brief period in history a majority of the population. The evidence that significant minorities were involved in drug use, and the point that a much larger number would have ‘lifetime’ knowledge of ‘drug stories’ and ‘offer situations’ was central to their case.

But the NWLS team offered an additional argument that can be regarded as the sixth dimension of the normalisation thesis. They pointed to evidence of ‘cultural accommodation’ to drug use in both the original Illegal Leisure (Parker et al., 1998: 156) and in their more recent defence (Parker et. al., 2002). This is not a quantitative measure but an observation and assessment of features of popular culture. They suggested that ‘there are multiple indicative signs of recreational drug use being accepted as a “liveable with” reality by the wider society’ (2002: 949). The evidence they find for this is located within media and popular culture; they cite television drama, stand up comedy and films as key indicators, alongside the cultural patterns manifest in the nighttime economy and British youth culture. In other words, the mediation of popular drug culture is at the heart of their argument. So the extent to which we should regard ‘recreational’ drug use as ‘normalised’ depends partly upon what we decide ‘normal’ means in quantitative terms but also how much significance we attribute to the drug discourses and patterns of representation we find circulating through popular culture and in the ways that people engage with such cultural currents.

The Normalisation Thesis a Decade Further on

There is emerging evidence to suggest that the accelerated increase in recreational drug use that characterized the 1990s has slowed and is now perhaps going into reverse, at least within the United Kingdom. The picture produced by any particular piece of research depends partly upon the questions asked and the methodology employed. For this reason it is very unlikely that a single definitive measure of drug use can ever be provided, but it is possible to assemble some kind of assessment by placing together in combination the variety of ‘micro’ case studies of particular localities, broader surveys, and trends captured by official data gathering exercises, such as the British Crime Survey (and now the England and Wales Crime Survey) and its equivalents.

In the early 2000s, Allen found that more than half the young people surveyed in the setting of a youth club in London reported using drugs (2003) but by the middle of the 2000s it was becoming clear that licit and illicit drug repertoires were not static and might be subject to significant shifts in and out of particular substances. There was evidence of some migration from illicit drugs toward alcohol at least on the club scene (Measham and Brain, 2005). However, toward the end of the first decade of the new century the data produced by the British Crime Survey/Crime Survey for England and Wales (CSEW) suggested that the upward rise in reported drug use reached a peak in England and Wales in the middle of the first decade (around 2003–2004) but slightly declined subsequently. According to the most recent CSEW for 2011–2012, 36.5 percent of adults, or approximately 12 million people, reported using drugs at some point in their ‘lifetime’, while 8.9 percent, or nearly 3 million, reported use in the ‘last year’ (Blunt, 2012). However, for the purposes of assessing the ‘normalisation debate’ the most useful comparisons are those to be made between the mid-90s at the height of the ‘decade of dance’ and the present day. The data for sixteen to twenty-four year olds, the age cohort that could be described as the vanguard of dance culture, is telling. In 1996 the percentage reporting use of any drug in the last year was 29.7 percent and this has gradually declined to 19.3 percent, though the last half of the decade represented something of a plateau at around 21 to 22 percent before most recently dropping below 20 percent (Blunt, 2012: 13). Among sixteen to twenty-four year olds, the percentage reporting ‘last year’ usage of class A drugs in 1996 was 9.2 percent and this fell to 6.3 in the 2011–2012 survey. A large proportion of the decline has been caused by a movement away from cannabis (last year use 26 percent in 1996, down to 15.7 percent in 2011–2012), while last year reported ecstasy use among sixteen to twenty-four year olds was also down from 6.6 percent in 1996 to 3.3 percent in 2011–2012 (Blunt, 2012: 12). However, the point that drug repertoires are subject to change in taste, and availability, is underlined by the increased use of cocaine (powder) where reported last year use among sixteen to twenty-four year olds has increased from 1.3 percent in 1996 to 4.2 percent in 2011–2012; by the rise of mephedrone to be used more frequently than ecstasy (3.3 percent last year usage in 2011–2012); and by the peak in the use of ketamine in 2010– 2011 at 2.1 percent before dropping to 1.8 percent in 2011–2012. While only a small minority use opiates this has barely changed over the decade and a half from 0.4 percent of sixteen to twenty-four year olds reporting use in 1996 and 0.5 percent in 2011–2012 (Blunt, 2012: 12–14).

The CSEW presents a complex picture in England and Wales. What we can say is that the fears of a continuing acceleration in drug use among teenagers and young adults that appeared to be a possibility a decade ago have proved unfounded. There seems to have been a gradual decline in overall drug use among these age groups in recent years; though it is also likely that the CSEW underestimates drug use among the young because it is administered to stable households, which may fail to capture transient youthful populations, such as students, and it is precisely these social groups that are likely to have higher than average rates of drug use. It also explicitly excludes prisoners and young offenders. And while overall rates of reporting have gradually declined, patterns for particular drugs, including Class A cocaine, have increased. Other large scale surveys such as the National Foundation for Educational Research and Department for Children, Schools and Families TellUs survey of school students in England also point to a modest decline in reported drug use among the Year Eight and Year Ten pupils (eleve...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Diagrams
• List of Tables
• Acknowledgments
• 1 Introduction: Cultures of Intoxication
• 2 Representing Drugs and Intoxication in Popular Media
• 3 The Mediated Regulation of Intoxication in the Age of ‘Old’ Media: The US Experience from ‘Reefer Madness’ to “Just Say No”
• 4 Drugs Regulation and Mediated Drugs Education in Britain
• 5 New Media, Popular Culture and Cultures of Intoxication
• 6 Virtual Intoxication: YouTube and Popular Drugs Culture
• 7 Conclusion: Virtual Intoxication, Drug Styles and the Way We Consume
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index