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 everyday understandings of 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 police project in service to the broader economic and geostrategic interests of the United States.
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’ links war/police, drugs/terror, urban/rural, foreign/domestic, animating the public’s imagination with the spectre of proliferating Meth Wars.
Publisher's website
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’ links war/police, drugs/terror, urban/rural, foreign/domestic, animating the public’s imagination with the spectre of proliferating Meth Wars.
Publisher's website
"Linnemanns book is a key text for understanding how moral panics about an infernal substance, and its diabolical seller, both stem from and further entrench the manifold contradictions of late capitalist society." ~Antipode
"A cultural criminological tour de force, Travis Linnemanns Meth Wars constitutes a brilliant counterpoint to everyday assumptions about drugs, crime, and policing. Moving from television dramas to public service announcements, from small town policing in rural America to global narcopolitics, Linnemann unpacks an insidious methamphetamine imaginary that has come to saturate contemporary social life. In doing so he reveals a deeper secret: if there is indeed a meth epidemic, it is one of epistemic proportions." ~Jeff Ferrell,author of Empire of Scrounge
"A scholarly page-turner, Meth Wars takes us on a journey through the cultural imaginary surrounding drug crime, policing, and punishment in the most thorough and illuminating way to date. Poetic, critical, and rigorous, Travis Linnemann frames how we 'see' meth and how our views lead others to 'see' meth as well through the power of misplaced drug war rhetoric. This study of whiteness, class, and privilege in drug imagery and drug wars is a profound contribution." ~Michelle Brown,author of The Culture of Punishment
"Contributing to scholarly debates about the political and cultural intersections of drugs, rurality, and whiteness, Meth Wars shows how meth impacts not just individuals and institutions but also imaginations. Ultimately, this is a book about challenging the reader to think beyond the widespread justifications for sustaining the war on drugs and the popularized arguments for ending it. Questioning both leftwing and rightwing sensibilities on drugs, Linnemann provokes the reader into imagining a different world one beyond the meth imaginary." ~Jennifer Carlson,Assistant Professor of Sociology, University of Arizona
"Meth Wars interrupts official discourse on drug use in America, drawing out the relationship between methamphetamine and the politics of fear. Linnemann invites us into the methamphetamine imaginary, deftly detailing how racism, the drug war and capitalism are manifested and maintained through pop culture, policing and state power. A compelling resource on a critical subject." ~Dawn Paley,author of Drug War Capitalism
"A cultural criminological tour de force, Travis Linnemanns Meth Wars constitutes a brilliant counterpoint to everyday assumptions about drugs, crime, and policing. Moving from television dramas to public service announcements, from small town policing in rural America to global narcopolitics, Linnemann unpacks an insidious methamphetamine imaginary that has come to saturate contemporary social life. In doing so he reveals a deeper secret: if there is indeed a meth epidemic, it is one of epistemic proportions." ~Jeff Ferrell,author of Empire of Scrounge
"A scholarly page-turner, Meth Wars takes us on a journey through the cultural imaginary surrounding drug crime, policing, and punishment in the most thorough and illuminating way to date. Poetic, critical, and rigorous, Travis Linnemann frames how we 'see' meth and how our views lead others to 'see' meth as well through the power of misplaced drug war rhetoric. This study of whiteness, class, and privilege in drug imagery and drug wars is a profound contribution." ~Michelle Brown,author of The Culture of Punishment
"Contributing to scholarly debates about the political and cultural intersections of drugs, rurality, and whiteness, Meth Wars shows how meth impacts not just individuals and institutions but also imaginations. Ultimately, this is a book about challenging the reader to think beyond the widespread justifications for sustaining the war on drugs and the popularized arguments for ending it. Questioning both leftwing and rightwing sensibilities on drugs, Linnemann provokes the reader into imagining a different world one beyond the meth imaginary." ~Jennifer Carlson,Assistant Professor of Sociology, University of Arizona
"Meth Wars interrupts official discourse on drug use in America, drawing out the relationship between methamphetamine and the politics of fear. Linnemann invites us into the methamphetamine imaginary, deftly detailing how racism, the drug war and capitalism are manifested and maintained through pop culture, policing and state power. A compelling resource on a critical subject." ~Dawn Paley,author of Drug War Capitalism
