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.
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 the boundaries 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’ links 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 the boundaries 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.
"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
-Dawn Paley,author of Drug War Capitalism
"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
-Michelle Brown,author of The Culture of Punishment
“A cultural criminological tour de force, Travis Linnemann’s 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
-Jeff Ferrell,author of Empire of Scrounge
