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Alternative Criminology
Meth Wars: Police, Media, Power
Drugs have long aided in policing the symbolic terrains of conventional social life as well making the material boundaries between states and nations. Encountered in daily news reports, anti-drug advertising campaigns, popular television and film and the political work of police and politicians, the drug methamphetamine occupies a unique and important space in the public's imagination. In Meth Wars , Travis Linnemann maps dynamic systems of power that reaffirm race and class hierarchies, advance political agendas and produce the everyday texturesof life in the rural United States. Viewing the war on drugs and terror as entwined and inseparable, Meth Wars implicates small town police and counter-narcoterror agents alike in a singular project--the production of capitalist social order.
From the hit television series Breaking Bad , billboards and newspapers littered with the mug shots of suspected meth users, ethnographic accounts of small town police, to the world-wide hunts for "narcoterrorists"such as Joaquín "El Chapo" Guzman, Linnemann draws together a range of examples and critical interdisciplinary scholarship to offer an analysis of how the supposed 'meth epidemic' bridges war/police, drugs/terror, urban/rural, foreign/domestic, animating the public's imagination with the spectre of proliferating Meth Wars.
From the environmental dangers of discarded chemicals and volatile clandestine laboratories, the corporeal and racial insecurities provoked by the drug's affects on the body, coalitions mobilized to protect children, families and theboundaries of traditional morality, to the politics of mobility, border and nation, produced and reproduced by police who hunt traffickers across landscapes of all kinds, as part of a broader politics of security, the methamphetamine imaginary links small town streets to distant battlefields, setting out homeland battlefronts in a global drug war.
From the hit television series Breaking Bad , billboards and newspapers littered with the mug shots of suspected meth users, ethnographic accounts of small town police, to the world-wide hunts for "narcoterrorists"such as Joaquín "El Chapo" Guzman, Linnemann draws together a range of examples and critical interdisciplinary scholarship to offer an analysis of how the supposed 'meth epidemic' bridges war/police, drugs/terror, urban/rural, foreign/domestic, animating the public's imagination with the spectre of proliferating Meth Wars.
From the environmental dangers of discarded chemicals and volatile clandestine laboratories, the corporeal and racial insecurities provoked by the drug's affects on the body, coalitions mobilized to protect children, families and theboundaries of traditional morality, to the politics of mobility, border and nation, produced and reproduced by police who hunt traffickers across landscapes of all kinds, as part of a broader politics of security, the methamphetamine imaginary links small town streets to distant battlefields, setting out homeland battlefronts in a global drug war.
304 pages, Paperback
Published December 6, 2016
34 people want to read
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April 22, 2023
Very compelling analysis, I really liked how Linneman focused on the drug use imaginary, it reminded me of ontological politics. I thought the epilogue ran a bit adrift, but otherwise I would highly recommend this book to people who are trying to understand why, even though the War on Drugs fails to achieve its putative goals, it still receives massive operating budgets. I was also interested in how the War on Drugs was connected to racializing discourse (racecraft), as well as primitive accumulation (domestically and abroad).
Displaying 1 of 1 review