Changing the script on drugs

A recent article in The Independent (13th Feb) contrasted industry and media responses to two high profile individuals who have had equally high profile drug problems. The music industry showered Amy Winehouse with awards at the Grammys while her standard media soubriquet has become ‘troubled Amy Winehouse’. Compare this to Dwain Chambers. He was caught taking anabolic steroids, served out his ban and wanted to return to athletics. What was his industry’s response? Having won a race in Sheffield, he was entitled to be selected for the World Indoor Athletic Championships. He was duly selected, but in a press statement, UK Athletics made it clear they had done so very reluctantly. And for the media, the standard tag for the athlete is ‘drug cheat Dwain Chambers’. The Independent suggested the difference was that Amy Winehouse presents as a white female waif -like victim, while Chambers is strong, feisty and above all, black.

But writing for the online magazine Spiked (14th Feb), Tim Black had another take on this and one that might be closer to a wider truth about society’s general response to drug users. He pointed out that in Chambers’ own words, he had become a ‘leper’ within athletics. Black believed this was because Chambers hadn’t been sufficiently contrite enough; “What should have been a legal matter, that is, a finite punishment for transgressing a rule, has become something else entirely. It is now a moral crusade’. Chambers, says Black, is not being judged for what he did, but who he is. “For the British Athletics establishment, Dwain Chambers has become a necessary sacrifice”.

But the scapegoat metaphors extend way beyond one story of an athlete caught using banned drugs. Drug users are society’s modern day lepers. They are the new scapegoats – and while it can be argued that the plight of users is made inexorably worse by the drug laws, the deeply held antipathy towards drug users goes back into the Temperance years of the 19th century when drugs like heroin, morphine and cocaine were still legal.

Look back into the earliest days of the tabloid press in America and you will find all the iconography of the modern day red-tops – junkies, dope fiends and drug fiends populated the stories of the so-called Yellow Press. The stories were made more potent by the use of vivid illustrations – demons, skeletons, vampires and the Grim Reaper. The message was clear – drug users are in thrall to a supernatural power that can only slake its thirst by feeding on the lives of the innocent. While the Victorians talked of the ‘demon drink’, drug users were themselves ‘fiends’. In other words, the evil was inherent in the person, not the substance they were using.

Flash forward to the plight of Mrs Elizabeth Burton-Phillips. She had twin sons both addicted to heroin, one of whom committed suicide. She wrote a book and has been seen on many conference platforms and in media studios telling her tragic story. Did any interviewer or conference delegate opine, ‘But your sons were just evil drug fiends, they were rotten to start with!’. Of course they didn’t - because of course they weren’t.

But this is the media-driven narrative on drug users. Sadly it is also embedded in the attitudes of many professionals in health and social welfare, underpinned by the overweening emphasis on crime in the current drug strategy. Here in the UK, drug users are seen as lesser members of society; their drug use can deny them access to housing, healthcare, education, employment but above all, dignity. If you look abroad, examples of serious human rights abuses against drug users – including the imposition of the death penalty - are legion. After all, how can a sub-human have human rights?