Crime Media Culture, 2007

8/16/2019 Crime Media Culture, 2007

1/20

http://cmc.sagepub.com

Crime, Media, Culture

DOI: 10.1177/17416590070744432007; 3; 11Crime Media Culture

Michelle BrownMapping discursive closings in the war on drugs

http://cmc.sagepub.com/cgi/content/abstract/3/1/11 The online version of this article can be found at:

Published by:

http://www.sagepublications.com

can be found at:Crime, Media, CultureAdditional services and information for

http://cmc.sagepub.com/cgi/alertsEmail Alerts:

http://cmc.sagepub.com/subscriptionsSubscriptions:

http://www.sagepub.com/journalsReprints.navReprints:

http://www.sagepub.co.uk/journalsPermissions.navPermissions:

http://cmc.sagepub.com/cgi/content/refs/3/1/11Citations

by alonso pelayo on April 15, 2009http://cmc.sagepub.comDownloaded from

http://cmc.sagepub.com/cgi/alertshttp://cmc.sagepub.com/cgi/alertshttp://cmc.sagepub.com/subscriptionshttp://cmc.sagepub.com/subscriptionshttp://www.sagepub.com/journalsReprints.navhttp://www.sagepub.com/journalsReprints.navhttp://www.sagepub.com/journalsReprints.navhttp://www.sagepub.co.uk/journalsPermissions.navhttp://www.sagepub.co.uk/journalsPermissions.navhttp://cmc.sagepub.com/cgi/content/refs/3/1/11http://cmc.sagepub.com/http://cmc.sagepub.com/http://cmc.sagepub.com/http://cmc.sagepub.com/http://cmc.sagepub.com/cgi/content/refs/3/1/11http://www.sagepub.co.uk/journalsPermissions.navhttp://www.sagepub.com/journalsReprints.navhttp://cmc.sagepub.com/subscriptionshttp://cmc.sagepub.com/cgi/alerts


2/20

BROWN MAPPING DISCURSIVE CLOSINGS 11

Mapping discursive closings in the war on drugs

MICHELLE BROWN, Ohio University, USA

AbstractThis article maps the discursive closing of the most recent war on drugs through a series

of case studies drawn from popular culture. This kind of work is performed in an effort to

theorize the reflexive role of structure and agency in criminological representation. Each

of the three selected cases demonstrates important shifts in conventions of representation

that are historically contingent and recursively embedded in developing understandings

of the relationship between drugs, individual actors and larger structural forces of

sovereignty, inequality, and criminality. Each highlights the nature of a protracted crisis of

representation in popular narratives of the war on drugs, where individual actors, even in

their most mainstream manifestations, are depicted as caught within complex institutional

contradictions which often paradoxically affirm and subvert drug war contexts.

Key words

discursive gap/closing; reflexivity; representation; structure and agency; war on drugs

INTRODUCTION: A DRUG WAR MONTAGE

Narcotics have been systematically scapegoated and demonized. The idea that anyone

can use drugs and escape a horrible fate is anathema to these idiots. I predict in

the near future that right wingers will use drug hysteria as a pretext to set up an

international police apparatus. (William Burroughs’s cameo appearance in DrugstoreCowboy (1989))

I promised the American people I would do something about the drugs pouring into

this country. What do these drug dealers think? … That we’re powerless? … That they

can keep doing this kind of thing and there’s no response ever? The course of action

I’d suggest is a course of action I can’t suggest. The drug cartels represent a clear and

present danger to the national security of the United States. (President Bennett (Donald

Moffat) in A Clear and Present Danger (1994))

CRIME MEDIA CULTURE © 2007 SAGE Publications, Los Angeles, London, New Delhi and Singapore,www.sagepublications.com, ISSN 1741-6590, Vol 3(1): 11–29 [DOI: 10.1177/1741659007074443]

ARTICLES


http://cmc.sagepub.com/http://cmc.sagepub.com/http://cmc.sagepub.com/http://cmc.sagepub.com/


3/20

12 CRIME MEDIA CULTURE 3(1)

If you start in with the war metaphors, I’m going to drive this car into a fucking

telephone pole. (Barbara Wakefield (Amy Irving) to her husband, drug czar Robert

Wakefield (Michael Douglas) in Traffic (2000))

‘Fighting a war on drugs one brutality case at a time …’ ‘Girl, you can’t even call this shit a war.’

‘Why not?’

‘Wars end.’

(Conversation between narcotics detectives Greggs (Sonja Sohn) and Carver (Seth

Gilliam) on HBO’s The Wire (2003))

In the aftermath of 9/11 one emergent current of political drug discourse explicitly cou-

pled terrorism with the drug trade. The National Youth Anti-drug Media Campaign (www.

theantidrug.com), a preventive initiative launched by the White House Office of National

Drug Control Policy (ODCP) in 1998 to target adolescent youth, served as the primaryconduit for this controversial campaign, itself a bipartisan partnership between civic

groups, anti-drug lobbyists, faith-based programs, private corporations, and the federal

government. Its ads aired heavily in the aftermath of September 11th across television,

print journalism, and cyberspace. The campaign disseminated its message through images

of everyday individuals (largely adolescent, middle-class, next-door-neighborly types of

various races and both genders) expressing stark statements about the impact of their

own drug use. One television commercial ran the following text, each line coupled with a

seemingly innocuous face:

I helped murder families in Colombia.

It was just innocent fun.

I helped kidnap people’s dads.

Hey, some harmless fun.

I helped kids learn how to kill.

I was just having some fun, you know.

I helped kill policemen.

I was just having fun.

I helped a bomber get a fake passport.

All the kids do it.I helped kill a judge.

I helped blow up buildings.

My life, my body.

It’s not like I was hurting anyone else.

This kind of paternalistic official discourse overtly couples a deresponsibilized individualized

image of recreational drug use (‘just having fun’, ‘all the kids do it’) with the violent imagery

of a structural form of violence, terrorism (and a politicized, gendered sub-text – ‘my life, my

body’). In many ways, this kind of campaign alludes to the major conventional parameters

for dominant drug discourse in the USA – techniques focused upon a responsibilization of

the individual, the privileging of a narrow conception of free will, a solely and completely

rational actor, alongside stark binary oppositions of good and evil. These constellations


http://cmc.sagepub.com/http://cmc.sagepub.com/http://cmc.sagepub.com/


4/20


create easy linkages by which, semiotically, to chain individuals to the structural concerns

of criminality, violence, and terror. These ads, however, were quickly parodied through a

counter campaign launched by Lindesmith’s Drug Policy Alliance, eventually resulting in

the ODCP’s cancellation of the ad campaign.1 Part of the Drug Policy Alliance’s strategy

in condemning the anti-drug ads included criticizing the jump in logic made when linking

non-violent drug using Americans to acts of terror.

These leaps are not unusual in the cultural vocabularies surrounding drug use in the

United States, but rather constitute the classical mode of representation – a superficial and

asociological approach to explanation, albeit one that is routinely widespread and available

in the cultural discourses surrounding drugs. In the aftermath of hurricane Katrina, as

images of human desperation and violence achieved widespread coverage, local and state

political officials closed up discursive gaps founded upon structural inequality and poverty,

race and class, by resorting to individualized frames of blame, labeling looters and those

engaged in violence as drug addicts.2 Significantly, these discursive closings depend upon aprivileging of individualism with its emphasis upon a culpable free will and simultaneously

a distinct form of sociological denial, characterized by a common cultural inability to

articulate the relationship between individuals and social structure. Consequently, these

kinds of performances, as cultural contradictions, constitute compelling settings for

criminological analysis. Strategically, they permit us the opportunity to explore how drugs

are invested with meaning and how drug wars are made or unmade culturally, primarily

through invocations and explorations of the relationship shared between the state and

its drug-using or drug-dealing citizens. We are also permitted by way of such analysis to

engage in a larger theoretical enterprise that defines the terms of social scientific study – acontinuing conjugation of the relationship between individual agency and social structure –

and our ability or inability to articulate/represent that relationship.

The relationship between individuals and society, albeit the central project of social

scientific thought, remains highly contentious in cultural vocabularies. Those ‘private

troubles’ of C. Wright Mills’s sociological imagination and their relationship to historically

contingent public issues and increasingly complex social institutions remain among

the most difficult of relationships to articulate. A focus upon the individual, of course,

privileges particular notions of agency, free will, and rational choice. The social, on the

other hand, demands a sophisticated language which privileges not simply relationships

and interaction but complex accounts of fields of interaction and the reasons why practices

achieve durability and institutional status, amidst expansive networks of social actors and

engagements. More significantly, it demands as well an account of the ways in which

these configurations are contextualized through conditions and choices into convergent

social forces, such as poverty, inequality, and criminality. A vocabulary which privileges

the individual will depend in its social reactions upon accountability, responsibility, blame,

and punishment. Perhaps, moreover, this vocabulary will perceive any discussion of the

social conditions of individualism as denial or worse, an excuse. Pathways, trajectories,

and explanations of social problems, then, will depend fundamentally in these contexts

upon a denial of the social. One of the arguments in this article, however, revolves around

the idea that such denial is not easily maintained in cultural practice – that these gaps

between individualistic orientations and the structural relations that define modern life




5/20


are difficult to leave open and thus constitute perpetual sites of anxiety and negotiation

in the construction of meaning.

Negotiating these kinds of discursive gaps culminates in a fundamental tension

between private and public where the linkages and networks which make up social life

are experienced in a field of uncertainty, one in which ambiguity serves as a central social

axis. For Anthony Giddens, this phenomenon is imagined as a form of structuration –

a complex of processes that permit simultaneous reproduction and innovation, where

action is constrained and enabled. Giddens’s notion of the duality of structure highlights

the recursive maneuver at the heart of structuration where action shapes and is shaped

by overarching structures that are continuously reproduced and revised. This reflexive

aspect of modern life, so central to the work of most contemporary social theorists

(Bourdieu, 1977; Giddens, 1990; Beck, 1992; Bauman, 1998), gives careful attention to

the institutional structuring of knowledge and the contests that ultimately feed into the

distinctive features of particular logics in social practice. Here social practice is continuallyrevised in light of new knowledge and more information, a process which is seen as

constituting the driving force of modernity. For Giddens (1990), ‘sociological knowledge

spirals in and out of the universe of social life, reconstructing both itself and that universe

as an integral part of that process’ (p. 16). Reflexivity ‘is introduced into the very basis of

system reproduction, such that thought and action are constantly refracted back upon one

another … The reflexivity of modern social life consists in the fact that social practices are

constantly examined and reformed in the light of incoming information about those very

practices, thus constitutively altering their character’ and providing for the possibility of

social transformation (p. 38). The highly reflexive and recursive character of late modernityis further argued to fuel new insecurities and uncertainties as science and knowledge

accumulate in malleable and often contradictory ways. Such a tendency in society possibly

indicates less about risk and danger and more about particular sites of uncertainty,

discursive gaps in cultural understandings, that are not yet named or understood. Drug

discourse constitutes precisely such a site.

Drugs are peculiar things in cultural representation, often directing us to sites of

fear, trauma, and indeterminacy in public discourse, consequently subject to dramatic

exaggeration, revision, and reinterpretation (Rogin, 1987; Lenson, 1995). Because drug

representations are fundamentally caught up in processes of structuration, always at

the core of drug representation is a problem of signification. Questions surrounding the

primary cultural frames of drug representation reveal this problematic: why were (and

still are) crack /cocaine and individuals associated with its use and distribution so easily

demonized in public rhetoric? More generally, why have chemical substances historically

been so susceptible to the framing of political crises and moral panics in the United States?

Why is the essential image of drug use and the user an excessive one, subject to a total

loss of control, essential to the politicization of crime? What is to be made of the fact that

this use is historically and publicly attached to groups of ethnic and political minorities,

whose persistent demonization forces them into the categories of ‘other’ and the

‘dangerous class’? Why are contemporary drug representations almost always bound up

with notions of sovereignty – national defense, security, and the frames of war? And,




6/20


finally, what is really at stake in the visual enactment of social reaction against drugs –

what is the specific relationship envisioned between the individual and the social, between

the agent and structure? These questions are the starting points for a fuller theorization

of drug discourse, which begins from the assumption that the war on drugs is not really

about drugs, but about key sites of cultural indeterminacy and the anxieties that surround

them.

Consequently, in matters of representation, drug war imagery provides a complex

site from which to work through key discursive gaps in knowledge reproduced through

sociological, criminological, and media frames. Moral panic approaches are perhaps the

most central example of this recurrence. The mode of media production and analysis

most essential to drug imagery, moral panic approaches have been widespread in their

application in criminology. As the predominant theoretical legacy in the study of crime and

culture, social constructionist perspectives dominate theoretical perspectives as evidenced

through the classic and frequent invocation of Jock Young’s The Drug Takers (1971),Stanley Cohen’s seminal work in Folk Devils and Moral Panics (1972) and Hall et al.’s classic

Policing the Crisis (1978).

These studies and their contemporaries are centered inevitably upon the misrepre-

sentation of crime and the manufacturing of ideologically dominant perspectives. Each is

centered upon myth busting where dominant discourse about crime is consistently exposed

as inconsistent with particular crime realities and this incompatibility as a source which

often exacerbates the social problems underscoring criminality within political and public

forums. This trajectory is largely directed toward the articulation of misrepresentation

where evidence persistently points to a lack of congruity between crime realities and their

mass-mediated image. Moral panic approaches consistently demonstrate this obsession

with the ‘real’ vs. the mediated. But, as Simon Watney (1987) argues, the real is always

and inherently mediated:

Moral panic theory is always obliged in the final instance to refer and contrast

‘representation’ to the arbitration of ‘the real’, and is hence unable to develop a full

theory concerning the operations of ideology within all representational systems. Moral

panics seem to appear and disappear, as if representation were not the site of permanent

struggle of the meaning of signs. (cited in McRobbie and Thornton, 1995: 564)

I propose an alternative starting point for a dialogue about what the work of media andrepresentational analysis means in criminology. This kind of approach hinges upon the

acknowledgment of a key assumption:

The media is no longer something separable from society. Social reality is experienced

through language, communication and imagery. Social meanings and social differences

are inextricably tied up with representation. Thus when sociologists call for an account

which tells how life actually is, and which deals with the real issues rather than the

spectacular and exaggerated ones, the point is that these accounts of reality are already

representations and sets of meanings about what they perceive the ‘real’ issues to be.

These versions of ‘reality’ would also be impregnated with the mark of media imagery

rather than somehow pure and untouched by the all-pervasive traces of contemporary

communications. (McRobbie and Thornton, 1995: 571)




7/20


Consquently, in this piece, I engage in a specific employment of media analysis. Although

I am interested in analysis as a means through which to ‘examine the cultural life’ of the

institutional practices surrounding crime and punishment, including the cultural politics

of criminology – how popular culture communicates specific kinds of knowledge (Sarat,

2001: 211) and upholds particular ideologies (Surette, 1992; Pfohl, 1994; Young, 1996;

Rafter, 2000), ultimately I feel these are strategies which are largely preliminary and carry

with them monolithic notions of ‘society’ and ‘consensus’. My approach assumes that

in order to theorize how those representations are fundamentally bound up with social

practice, one must interrogate how images are recursively caught in the reproduction

and reinvention of social knowledge and ideology, sites of permanent struggle (Hall,

1980; McRobbie and Thornton, 1995; Manning, 1998). I do this through an application

which examines several popular yet complex efforts at the discursive closing of the war on

cocaine. By discursive closing, I do not intend to imply that cocaine no longer constitutes

a key social problem in particular settings, nor that social reaction has ceased to conceiveof the substance as a key social problem. Rather, it is my contention that other kinds of

wars and drugs have taken on greater precedence in political and public agendas. More

significantly, discursive closing implies that the popular configuration of the most recent

war on drugs is defined by efforts to close off unsettling absences that are inevitably

exposed in any depiction of the relationship between individual actors (drug dealers,

users, and enforcers) and social structure (race, class, gender, crime, and poverty), albeit in

very distinct ways. This closing is marked by a constellation of cultural performances which

gradually cycle into distinct strategies and trajectories of representation, each addressing

differently, while building upon the conventions of the other, the chronic contradictionsthat leave Americans suspended in a war on drugs that seemingly never ends. Three

performances which map the complexity of this tendency are the Hollywood productions

of A Clear and Present Danger (AC&PD) and Traffic, followed by HBO’s original series,

The Wire. What this article provides is an examination of how, through select cultural

performances such as these, we see knowledge being built, knowledge that, in its most

mediated forms, is ill-conceived as an ‘emptying’ of meaning from social lives (or a break

between the real and the image) but rather, like all modes of knowledge, typically imports

‘dense but inadequate meanings’ into those lives (Wynne, 1996: 60).

A CLEAR AND PRESENT DANGER

Based on the popular Tom Clancy (1990) novel, A Clear and Present Danger (AC&PD),

begins with the discovery of the murder of a wealthy banker/personal friend of the President

and his family in the South Carribean. The film, from the start, is framed fundamentally in

terms of the individual agent. Clancy’s hero, Jack Ryan (Harrison Ford), is called in by CIA

Director Admiral James Greer (James Earl Jones) to solve the murder. Ryan quickly links

the murder to the structural contexts of international drug trafficking, money laundering,

developing narco-states, and the Cali Cartel. The President, personally enraged by his

friend’s death, tells National Security Advisor James Cutter (Harris Yulin) that, although

he cannot publicly declare this, the drug cartels ‘represent a clear and present danger to




8/20


the national security of the United States’, marking the drug traffickers as national threats

and enemies, accentuating the peculiar collusiveness between drugs, national security,

and war.

The film is useful in depicting formally the manner in which different kinds of know-

ledge are accumulated and the complex stakes which sit center stage when these often

oppositional kinds of knowledge converge. For instance, after Ryan’s conversation with the

President, Cutter enlists the aid of CIA Director, Robert Ritter (Henry Czerny), who covertly

hires a renegade ex-patriot commando, Clark (Willem Dafoe), to conduct paramilitary

operations against the Cali Cartel in Colombia. This secret policy is classified ‘Operation

Reciprocity’, a euphemism which contains the retributive undertones and individualistic

framework of blame underlying the wounded personal and national identity expressed in

the President’s initial anger. The President is portrayed throughout the film as conflating

personal sentiments with national concerns, combining these factors in one package as

a direct threat to the sovereign power of the USA. However, AC&PD poses this militaryreorientation as problematic through the juxtaposition of knowledge. For this reason, it

marks a fundamental shift in popular mainstream drug war imagery of the period as it

launches not only an internal critique of US drug policy, but refers to the recursive character

of social practice where US international relations and foreign policy have contributed to

key configurations of the drug war.

This film creates this meaning through one main editing device: crosscutting. This

strategy creates a heterogenous space, depicting separate spatial events which are

occurring in time simultaneously. Although a foundational feature of classical continuity

editing, crosscutting nevertheless expresses the potential to push mainstream narrativeconventions: creating tension and suspense, building different kinds of knowledge. A

particularly powerful rhetorical device, crosscutting provides the viewer with information

that diegetically is not fully accessible to all characters. In such a manner, it mimics the

complex way in which various kinds of knowledge circulate in daily social practice among

various kinds of actors. In AC&PD, this editing strategy is instrumental to the creation of

narratives that counter the ‘official’ version of events. When the newly promoted Ryan,

now acting CIA Deputy Director (in place of the ailing Greer), goes before the Senate to

request anti-drug funds to ‘help’ the Colombians fight the drug war, this scene is intercut

with American troops being dropped into the Colombian countryside. As the unknowing

Ryan gives the Senate his word that this funding will take the form of supply and advice

only with no covert military action, one senator reminds him of a similar situation and its

escalation two decades ago with a little known country in Southeast Asia, a reference to

Vietnam. These scenes are framed in opposition and followed by the renegade Carter

sending Cutter a congratulatory email, saying, ‘You’ve got your own little war’. This

brief series of scenes establishes the convention through which the film problematizes

military involvement in the war on drugs, a problematization that depends upon audience

awareness of a discursive gap, an ironic tension deriving from the different kinds of

knowledge that are given expression in different contexts.

As Ryan slowly unravels the depth of corruption and involvement of the President’s

administration in this foreign ‘war’, he visits Greer in the hospital and relates his disgust

at this insidious aspect of his new ‘political’ knowledge. As the former deputy director




9/20


lies on his deathbed, he tells Ryan, ‘You took an oath, if you recall, when you first came

to work for me, and I don’t mean to the National Security Advisor of the United States,

and I don’t mean to the President. You gave your word to his boss. You gave your word

to the people of the United States and your word is who you are’. Ryan is clearly marked

here by the film as the bearer of national identity as the torch is passed from Greer to

Ryan in a manner that will prove essential to the closing of the gap. In perhaps the most

crucial symbolic series of scenes in terms of national identity, the covert operations troops

are sacrificed to the cartel and decimated in the jungle in segments which are crosscut

with the funeral of James Greer. The President delivers Greer’s eulogy, describing how

he ‘devoted his life to his country and family’, a man of ‘knowledge, honesty, integrity,

and courage’. He adds, ‘never at all was he deluded in thinking one man could solve the

ills of the world’. Greer was ‘part of a unit’, dedicated to the preservation of the ideals

of his nation, all of which is narrated over the ambush of American troops while Ryan

silently grieves at Greer’s graveside. The sequence evokes a powerful double image of thesymbolic death of America through the corruption of its ideals and principles at home

in the highest political offices, while simultaneously marking Ryan, individually, as the

remaining body of the state.

It is here that the official and hidden plots of the film begin to intersect through a

convergence of different kinds of knowledge. In a tense confrontation, Ryan presents

Ritter with evidence of his corrupt behavior, to which Ritter replies that the world is not

black and white, but ‘gray’ – the gap exposed. Ryan responds with disinterest in this

distinction, as he is more concerned with the difference between ‘right and wrong’. At

this point, his ineptitude and idealistic oversight are reclaimed as the lost moral aspects ofAmerican national identity. Ryan is made potent again, as he returns to Colombia, enlists

Clark’s help, buys a helicopter, and rescues the remaining American soldiers imprisoned by

the Cali cartel. Ryan makes a successful return home and confronts the President with his

own involvement in the undercover operations. The film concludes with Ryan beginning

his testimony of the truth at Senate hearings – a maneuver which is indicative of the

closing of a discursive gap that is again also reflexive, both reintroducing and reaffirming

legitimacy in state power.

It is through AC&PD’ s use of crosscutting for ironic purposes that the film challenges,

albeit in an inevitably compromised manner, the dominant discourse of drug demonization.

In its juxtaposition of official and covert stories of the war on drugs, conventional lines

between heroes and villains are blurred as it becomes evident that members of the

President’s administration are manipulating the war to suit their own ends. Appearing

at the essential conclusion of the Bush administration’s declared War on Drugs, the film

represents the ways in which, culturally, drug discourse was already being revised through

reflexive strategies surrounding the gaps that perpetually occur in the conjugation of

structure and agency. However, because these frames assume an ‘official’ versus a ‘real’

covert narrative, larger issues concerning the relationship between structure and agency

are conveniently redirected. Part of this alteration occurs through one of Clancy’s favorite

plot devices: the crisis of credibility experienced by the post-Cold War American state.

Amidst a late modern, increasingly global context, drugs become useful benchmarks

for exploring (and exploiting) the pervasive feelings of anxiety, trauma, and insecurity




10/20


which attend discussions of state borders and sovereignty (Giddens, 1990; Beck, 1992;

Bauman, 1998; Girling et al., 1999; Garland, 2001). As the film illustrates, the state’s

punitive and militant faces appear in their most extreme invocations when the state is

most vulnerable (in President Moffatt’s words, ‘What do these drug dealers think? …That

we’re powerless?’) and, more significantly, are likely in social contexts where individualism

is privileged in the negotiation of discursive gaps.

In such a society, we approach a fundamental aporia – an absence in the cultural vo-

cabulary – which in its most troubling moments exposes the state’s increasing deligitimacy

while simultaneously facilitating its expanding authority through a culturally produced

nostalgia that demands, in the face of failure, more direct, responsive, immediate, indi-

vidualized action (Garland, 2001). In such a conflicted and contradictory setting, discursive

gaps are closed through the preservation of the nation/state often through the heroics of

a single individual. Consequently, in AC&PD, exposure, disruption, and the alteration of

drug war discourse are at best tentative. The film is never thoroughly able to question thelegitimacy of drug demonization, as it resorts to this same drug imagery to motivate plot

conflicts, pitting the singularly good against the singularly evil. And in keeping with this,

the film can never fully abandon the military metaphors which have so restricted the pub-

lic debate about drugs. Rather, in the story’s conclusion, as Ryan rescues American hos-

tages, the film provides a space for the military re-enactment of classic American frames

of captivity and rescue, facilitating the reclaiming of a lost individualized masculinity and

national identity in the war on drugs.

TRAFFIC

Traffic is a film that emerges from the ironies and ambiguities of previous drug war

representations. Fraught with fundamental contradictions, it is a narrative which, like its

predecessors, is caught within the constraints of structure and a stubborn insistence upon

individual agency, but effectively utilizes these contradictions to expose the social impacts

of these very limits. This critique is situated within the formal structure of the film itself

(similarly to AC&PD) as it maps the invisible holistics of a war on drugs, its networks of

ever-expanding inter-relationships, through a tight mingling of multiple plot lines. Traffic invokes and popularizes a narrative strategy (now apparent in films like Crash, Syriana,

and Babel ) built around a large complex cast of characters all of whom are presented as

human and thus flawed rather than solely good or evil. Soderbergh’s filtered, often over-

exposed viewpoints cue us to the complex lives of his characters amidst intersections in

the global dimensions of the circulation of labor, law, power, and capital implicit in the

drug trade, where geographic location (and narrative exigesis) is mapped through color –

the arid, pale yellows of Mexico; the cold, sickly grey-blues of Washington and Cincinnati;

the effusive, tropical schemes of San Diego. This complex configuration is, surprisingly,

easily transferred from Alistair Reid’s 1989 British mini-series (Traffik – broadcast in the

USA on Masterpiece Theatre) which mapped the migration of heroin from Turkey to

Europe, a transplantation which emphasizes drug trafficking as a useful metanarrative in

a contemplation of boundaries.




11/20


In its American incarnation, a film where main characters pass each other at busy

intersections in Tijuana, Mexico City, San Diego, Cincinnati, Washington, DC, and the

USA/Mexico border, crossings become the central gesture in the film’s most ambitious

project, the incorporation of the trajectories of numerous individual lives and deaths into

one larger social narrative that transcends geopolitical boundaries. This use of borders

as the film’s essential framing device is a crucial theoretical maneuver in that whereas

the frontier implies a state center and a unidirectional movement of power, borders are

permeable, perpetually being traversed, and thus tend to have a decentering effect. Here,

in the transition between different times and space, identity becomes suddenly more

fluid – a transformation which affords strategical analytical possibilities, a means through

which to situate notions of difference and agency within larger structures of power and

knowledge. Akin to AC&PD’ s crosscutting strategies, these border crossings permit the

accumulation of different kinds of knowledge and experience in connection with the War

on Drugs. However, Soderbergh’s purpose is not really to tell a story of difference butrather to create the quintessential narrative of the War on Drugs, a feat which the film

effectively achieves, but not without invoking its own set of problematics.

The failure of the drug war, the film’s main discursive objective, is mapped primarily

through the exposure of how this war is being fought, who is caught up within it, and

why. The war’s main strategical centers are spread out across border zones – local, state,

federal, military, and international law enforcement jurisdictions – their success dependent

upon a complicated information exchange system built upon informants, secrets, and

betrayal. Information is deeply dangerous – in its absence of sharedness and its false

manipulation – and constitutes a key device in the management and exploitation ofdiscursive gaps. During an early scene in the film, one DEA agent is shot and an entire

undercover operation compromised when local San Diego police arrive in the midst of a

complicated, tense DEA bust, with neither side aware of the other’s plan for mobilization.

In another narrative strand, the man being prepped by the USA for Mexico’s drug czar

position, General Arturo Salazar (Tomas Milian) of the National Drug Force, is exposed as

deeply corrupt, the political front man for a Mexican drug cartel lord, assumed dead –

and the USA, specifically through the platitudes and policies of the new drug czar, has

simply facilitated one cartel (Juarez-based) over another (in Tijuana). Most relentless of all

is Soderbergh’s insistence upon the structural tautology of militaristic or political means to

achieve any headway – as the Juarez cartel is eventually dismantled after the exposure of

corruption, the Obregon brothers in Tijuana are brought back into business, and General

Salazar found in his own seat of torture at the end of the film. Official, economic, and

underground forces converge in individual actions and social practices which effectively

reproduce the structures supporting both the war on drugs and the drug trade.

Ultimately told from the point of view of individual actors, the film’s effectiveness relies

a good deal on its ability to build a structural narrative through empathetic, individualized

characters. These actors bear the conventional markers of a classic heroism: the lonely

stoicism of Tijuana police officer Javier Rodriguez (Benicio Del Toro); the mobile; idealistic

Judge Wakefield (Michael Douglas); the relentlessly perseverant DEA Agent Montel Gordon

(Don Cheadle). Among the film’s finer points, these qualities are distributed fairly evenly

across characters, including those whose morality is less admirable, but at times, clearly




12/20


understandable: Francisco Flores (Clifton Collins, Jr.) and Eduardo Ruiz (Miguel Ferrer) –

the tortured assassin and the duped dealer/informant; Helena Ayala (Catherine Zeta-

Jones), who, in order to protect her family and way of life, quickly becomes a self-made

entrepreneur in the trade herself; and the elite child of privilege, Seth Abrahams (Topher

Grace), responsible for introducing Wakefield’s daughter to drugs, who demonstrates

an intense acuity of the drug war’s role in the maintenance of social order and political

economies. Among such blurred moral and geopolitical boundaries, within the framework

of war, everyone becomes a casualty and yet, as the film’s tagline insists, ‘no one gets

away clean’. The lines between victim and perpetrator are perpetually problematized

and this, from Traffic’ s perspective, is why the drug war cannot be won. It is also why

the film is a more effective engagement of agency-centered approaches to structural

contradictions than its predecessor, AC&PD, precisely because it foregrounds the manner

in which discursive gaps are constant tensions, always in play. Most interestingly, this

knowledge of failure is held by all who participate in the war, a sense of defeatism theymust perpetually deny or resist and a sense of futility which accompanies the recursive

character of social action in late modernity. This complex sense of noble action in the

midst of futility is indicative of a tight structural relationship where individual actors find

their actions compromised daily through a very real cultural ambivalence in the USA where

drugs are widely used and produced, prohibited and celebrated.

In this respect, it is not surprising that Soderbergh concedes his narrative to a

recuperative framework that ultimately is consistent with the cautious manner in which

American cinema has treated issues of social justice, particularly since the 1970s, a general

tendency in representation toward what Austin Sarat (2001: 243) calls a criminologically‘conservative cultural politics’. In the end, Soderbergh cannot resist the temptation to situate

the drug war within a structure of recovery (medically and politically) and responsibility.

Drugs may ultimately be a public health problem in Traffic, but all drug war actors are

understandable and redeemable, especially if misdirectedly engaging in a lost battle. In

this manner, Soderbergh mobilizes the war metaphor himself to an extent by invoking

its frames to save his heroes. And he does this through the same cultural iconography of

state crisis as AC&PD – an exposure of deligitimacy which nonetheless is resurrected on

individual terms. In such a framework, reintegration and rehabilitation are easily mobilized

as essential theoretical companions to war discourse, emerging as elements of vindication,

counterpoint, and individualized justice. Soderbergh permits his favorite characters to

achieve this kind of self-justification in the final scenes of the film: DEA Agent Montel

Gordon plants his surveillance device in Carl Ayala’s study in a dramatic performance

of masculine confrontation and walks away smiling, his partner’s death in some sense

avenged; Judge Wakefield risks the ‘savage’ spaces of the black inner city to rescue his

daughter, resigns his position, and, no longer the absent father, accepts his patriarchal

role in the appropriate domestic space of the family; and the Mexican cop-turned-

informant Javier Rodriguez succeeds in bringing prevention and vision to his troubled

community in the form of baseball, all in an anonymous, lonely silence. In Rodriguez, a

rather ‘Americanized’ hero emerges again, across borders, through the re-enactment of

various kinds of metaphoric captivities and rescues, finding a provisional peace through

fleeting incorporations and resistances to cultural understandings of masculinity, race, and




13/20


sovereignty. Actors who have all chosen to act alone against institutions find themselves

through small decisions both revising and reproducing social practices that add up to a

perpetuation of a seemingly endless war.

I point to these twists and turns not to condemn or complicate Traffic’ s political and

cinematic contribution (which I feel is important), but rather to direct attention to how

discursive gaps in understandings of agency and structure underpin and often facilitate

drug war representations. The film’s critical and commercial success can be read as

indicative of its successful invocation of deeply-held American values and moral systems

against a sophisticated engagement of the very contradictions contained within these

frameworks. The familiar, essential markers of American individualism – masculinity, race,

and heroism – are reinvented in the film’s complicated deconstruction and recuperation of

drug war metaphors. Nowhere is this more apparent than in Soderbergh’s decision to play

the war back to us from the perspective of the individual – the most effective narrative

device in American discourse – and then contextualize that individualism in the aggregate,collective ‘we’ of an increasingly apparent global community, bound together structurally

through the illicit trafficking of drugs.

Beyond this, Traffic’ s images are tied to a complex, growing material structural reality –

an unprecedented expansion of the US penal system, widespread apparentness of unequal

sentencing structures, staggering racial disproportionality – all primarily patterned through

the enforcement of a war on drugs and its accompanying punitiveness (Beckett, 1997;

Duster, 1997; Mauer, 1999; Garland, 2001). The film’s very production is possible only

through such a stark sociological actuality. In the end, Soderbergh’s networks are so

encompassing and so vast that the audience sees its own fatigue and resignation in thefamiliar lifeless rhetoric of drug war policy as Judge Wakefield haltingly recites,

The war on drugs is a war that we have to win and a war that we can win. [Pause]

We have to win this war to save our country’s most precious resource, our children.

[Longer pause] Protecting these children must be priority number one. [Pause] There

has been progress and there has been failure. But where we have fallen short, I see not

a problem. [Pause] I see an opportunity. [Longer pause] … An opportunity to correct the

mistakes of the past, while laying a foundation for the future. This takes not only new

ideas, but perseverance. [Pause] This takes not only resources, but courage. [Pause] This

takes not only government, but families. [Pause] I’ve laid out at … [voice breaks] … I’velaid out a 10-point plan that … [very long pause)]

I can’t do this.

If there is a war on drugs, then many of our family members are the enemy. And I

don’t know how you wage war on your own family … [left hanging]

Wakefield’s speech mimics a prodigious popular and critical literature that dominates

the debate concerning the historicizing of the war on cocaine at this time, one whose

fundamental theme is a similar futility, framed by the official absence of either social jus-

tice (Duke and Gross, 1993; Baum, 1996; Gray, 1998) or, oppositionally, a clear national

commitment to a full-scale war for moral character (Kelling, 1996; Bennett et al., 1999). In

the wake of this popular discourse, Traffic appears, at first glance, to effectively complete the

cycle of representation that has followed the war on cocaine. It emphasizes the dense moral




14/20


ambiguity, deepening public mistrust, and attendant discursive gaps in the understanding

of social relations that undergird war rhetoric. It mobilizes individual actors across multiple

story-lines which all converge in a metanarrative of structure to effect this ambiguity. Then,

after a critique of the battle itself, it makes a recursive compromise by saving all who are

caught up in the war effort through a complex set of identity politics built upon the seduction

of recuperation and reproduction.

THE WIRE

The Wire is

about what’s been left behind in America. It’s not about good guys and bad guys. We

wanted to be subversive to the extent that you think you’re watching a show aboutwhether they’re going to get the bad guy or not but by the time you get to the end of

the show the idea of a good guy has less meaning than you thought it did and whether

or not they catch him is not the point. The point is the system is dysfunctional. (Simon

and Pelecanos, 2004)

In the study of the political economics of media ownership, debates have focused

upon the manner in which forces of integration, conglomeration, and concentration of

ownership have served to homogenize media outlets and limit production opportunities

through extensive corporate structures, thus reducing diversity and alternative or inde-

pendent approaches in representation. In such a context, fears circulate concerning thegrowing inability of a corporatized media to serve as an effective democratic institution

(McChesney, 1999; Chomsky, 2002). From this perspective, the media are often conceived

of as a singular institution and one that is distinctly overdetermined; yet, it would also

appear that the current economics of production have resulted in a variety of foreseeable

and unforeseeable practices, with complex social outcomes. These complexities include a

recycling of cultural performances through massive syndication and increasingly available

technology (DVD/VHS purchases and rentals; cable/satellite; TIVO) and the possibility in

some instances of a carefully regulated and channeled diversification of media programing,

whose modes and content are reflective of a carefully researched niche audience. Theproliferation and diversification of the mass media permit, in some instances somewhat

ironically, and certainly not without compromise, the creation of niche markets which can

risk divergent narrative lines and experimental programming. In this instance, television is

envisioned not as a passive space, but a provocative one. It is also a space characterized in

many ways precisely by its recursiveness.

Films like Traffic and AC&PD can be seen routinely, in cycles, due to the advent of

cable/satellite television, envisioned as an alternative to the big three networks, and now

constituting well over 300 networks, many of whom have created authentic innovations

in programming content. In such media worlds, directed toward niche audiences andstreamed through repetition and syndication, movies, television series, and individual

episodes circulate and recur across visual culture prolifically. The Wire emerges out of




15/20


precisely such a context, programming that is considered ‘groundbreaking’, experimental,

and can be seen repetitively by a subscribing niche audience or a purchasing audience

through DVD box sets of entire seasons. Because of its episodic structure, its subscription

audience, and its repetitive play, The Wire is able to do very different things than either

Traffic or AC&PD. David Simon, the show’s executive producer, fought to create a prog-

ram that would both exceed and violate conventional parameters of the police procedural

through a complex series of plot lines, developed carefully across a full season with a

clear institutional focus and a complex and extensive cast of characters. This sort of

understanding is central to The Wire itself, a show about ‘people and institutions – and

the ways in which our identities, our relationships to institutions inevitably compromise us’

(Simon and Pelecanos, 2004). In fact, the possibility of any narrative at all depends upon an

understanding of the relational. For these reasons, The Wire is a program directed nearly

entirely at the analysis of social networks mapped across institutional contradictions. It

is specifically ‘about the nature of institutions in modern culture and how individualsare affected by modern institutions they serve or are supposed to serve them’ with a

side argument ‘about the efficacy of the drug war’ (Simon and Pelecanos, 2004). This

institutional focus is apparent across the various core narratives of each season: Season 1

focuses upon the institutional contradictions and bureaucratic constraints of both law

enforcement and the drug trade; Season 2 takes as its subject the ‘death of work’ in the

Baltimore ports and shipping yards; the third and most recent season uses the city again as

a vortex through which to examine the nature of reform through primarily political lenses,

including ‘what would happen if one commander in one precinct in one American city

decided to surrender in the drug war’ (Simon and Pelecanos, 2004); Season 4 examinesthe issue of urban educational reform through the lives of a group of street youths; the

fifth and final upcoming season will examine the role of the mass media in the Baltimore

drug war.

The kinds of questions which the program raises result in the necessary violation

of a number of key narrative conventions. First, a narrative which gives attention to

institutional contradictions requires both breadth and depth: The Wire’s key cast members

exceed 60 actors. Its concluding episodes are fundamentally open-ended and unresolved.

Primary characters are commonly killed off. And the show is intentionally overloaded with

information. Like the detectives themselves, the audience is forced to sift through an

onslaught of information ‘garbage’ in order to make sense of things. Discursive gaps

frequent the plot structure: murders go unresolved, good, compassionate characters

are destroyed, and justice is always secondary. The narrative itself has such a complex

quality to its representations that it is virtually impossible to employ a single clip or episode

to depict a key concept or practice. It requires an entire season, and this precisely for

distinctly sociological reasons. Each character comes with a history and biography whose

accumulation creates meaning during a particular dramatic plot event and also adds a

perpetually recursive character to the plot itself, whose development builds from precisely

these kinds of intersections.

The show is particularly successful at rendering the binary constructions (which are

ultimately sustained in films like AC&PD) as profoundly and irrevocably blurred – the world

of the war on drugs is a gray one. The show does this through a sophisticated parallel




16/20


editing structure which runs a story of the street and a story of low-level law enforcement

simultaneously and against one another. In the first season, we are introduced to the

main characters through this kind of juxtaposition where key characters are depicted side

by side as they face similar institutional dilemmas from opposing perspectives and sides

of the drug war. The series commences with the formation of a low-level narcotics unit

through political design (as opposed to real law enforcement concerns on the part of

administrators). The unit quickly expands to include several key characters, all pulled from

various levels of law enforcement (homicide, major case unit, narcotics, district attorney’s

office, etc.) for different kinds of reasons, each with their own biography and concerns

for promotion, mobility, and, as the show routinely puts it, the capacity to do ‘the job’ of

‘good’ policing. The political and institutional factors which feed into administrative chain-

of-command decision making (best seen in the characters of the Police Commissioner and

Deputy Commissioner of Operations) are juxtaposed against the realities of police work

in a manner which makes clear that ‘good’ police work is institutionally impossible. Inthese kinds of contexts, individual actors who have clear social justice orientations find

themselves running up against absent resources, bureaucratic limits, politics and the law.

This is highlighted at the conclusion of the first season where the hardly obtained wire

tap is dismantled for bureaucratic and political reasons just as the case is about to break

wide open. In Season 3, we witness the growth within police management of actuarial

technology against the perspective of a single precinct chief who decides to use his

discretion to regulate the underground drug economy through a harm reduction model.

He clears an entire block in the city for open drug sales, dramatically reducing the violence

associated with turf trade, but also ushering in his own demotion.The street narrative, similar to the narcotics unit, primarily focuses upon one

organization, a crew of drug dealers headed by Avon Barksdale (Wood Harris) and his

partner, Stringer Bell (Idris Elba). The crew faces similar hierarchical problems in its attempt

to create an efficient, productive niche in the drug trade. Here, The Wire taps into one of

the definitive shifts in the organization of contemporary drug trade economies against the

backdrop of globalization. Unlike the centralized, hierarchical mafia structures of the past,

drug trafficking organizations are made up of actors who are more likely to be mapped

into global capital, organized by wealthy upper-level regulators with close proximity to

key political officials and diversified holdings which cover for drug markets. These actors,

having bought legitimacy and social acceptance, represent financial circuits and distribution

channels that span the globe specifically through drug exchange (Naim, 2005; Van

Schendel and Abraham, 2005). This has specific implications for the functional capacities

of local politics, which The Wire adeptly depicts, where ‘good police work’ is restricted

precisely because of the manner in which the political urban machine is now caught in

complex webs of bribery and corruption largely through money flows undergirded by

drug trafficking. This is best exemplified by the character of Stringer Bell who deals drugs

through a variety of fronts (a night club, funeral home, copy shop), attends business

school at night, and systematically begins to invest in commercial properties across the city

and network with politicians and officials, a carefully thought-out strategy directed at the

accumulation of social and cultural capital.




17/20


In its more compelling moments, the show depicts how mobility and escape, based

upon individual agency, out of the world of the drug trade, are virtually impossible due

to structural constraints. A particularly compelling example of this is the socialization of

low-level drug runners into the upper-level violence of the drug trade. In one of the show’s

more poignant moments in Season 1, a key character, a project runner named Wallace,

attempts to relocate out of the ‘game’ by moving to the country with his grandparents

after he is badly shaken by the brutal murder of a thief by his bosses. After a few weeks, he

returns to the projects where he explains to his boss that the only life he knows is project

life and the drug trade. In one of the show’s more famous lines, he concludes his pitch by

opening his arms to the project buildings and insisting ‘yo, this is me’. At the conclusion of

the season, he is murdered by his best friends who suspect he is not simply an informant

but more significantly has become too soft for the drug trade. They are forced to kill him by

Bell and Barksdale who recognize that the youths must be ‘bloody’ in order to move up in

the crew. In The Wire we routinely see the processes of internalized institutional violence,of the development of an oppositional street culture, of how structural marginalization

relates to personal and psychological depression and self-worth (on both sides of the law),

and the effects and outcomes of an absence of cultural and symbolic capital.

Both law enforcement and the street are depicted as worlds in which those who are

particularly sensitive, observant, and attentive to the complex ways in which this violence

is reproduced, those who are informed by a sense of social justice, are precisely the indi-

viduals who will fail professionally (McNulty, the show’s lead character, is demoted at

the end of Season 1 as are several other members of the narcotics unit) and personally

(most of the characters on the show have either transient relationships or find themselvesdivorced). Most are inevitably corrupted in some manner (implications of which hang

over Major Daniels who is in charge of the wire tap and officers Carver and Hauk who

consider taking a cut out of money retrieved during a drug bust). In the face of resistance

to complicity, several are injured (detective Greggs) or murdered by their own (Wallace and

D’Angelo Barksdale). Similar to Traffic, small individual acts of institutional resistance on

both sides of the law, grounded in compassion, are valorized, however futile, but, unlike

in Traffic, the futility now envelops all actors and an entire city and the show carefully

insists that these acts are not the source of direct political change. Rather, such futility is

precisely what happens to cities in a chronic war and is why, for Simon (2004), The Wire

is really the story of a post-industrial city, Baltimore, being told through the lenses of the

drug war. Through carefully drawn out cases, the show depicts the violence structurally

and interpersonally that occurs in these kinds of social settings and the complex manner in

which the institutional conjugates with the personal. The contradictions of social life persist,

as do the discursive gaps, but the knowledge constructed through The Wire foregrounds

the notion that these gaps are the structuring absences of late modernity.

DISCURSIVE GAP AS POSSIBILITY

Drug war representations thus constitute important sites from which to interrogate the

cultural conjugation of agency and structure. In the ‘double movement’ of initial critique




18/20


and ultimate recuperation that Nicole Rafter (2006) presents as emblematic of Hollywood

crime films, we witness both the articulations, revisions, and reproductions of cultural

discourse as well as those moments when that discourse fails. In the recuperative frame-

work, drug demonization serves a very powerful ideological objective by providing a single

point of explanation and blame for a vast variety of structural social problems, resulting in

what Reinarman and Levine (1997) call ‘a form of sociological denial’ which leads, logically,

to social control and imprisonment rather than alternative drug policy models. In this

manner, ‘the most basic premise of social science – that individual choices are influenced

by social circumstances – was rejected as left-wing ideology ( p. 37). Undoubtedly, the

majority of cultural representations in mainstream, contemporary popular culture still do

little more than reaffirm and perpetuate this ideology through the very ubiquity of the

drug user, addict, dealer, and trafficker as easy villains in familiar cultural mythologies.

As Judith Butler (2004) elaborates, these kinds of oppositional contexts insist upon an

irreconcilability that is, at heart, artificial where ‘the framework for hearing presumes thatthe one view nullifies the other’ (

p. 13). In such a context, explanation itself is suspect, ‘as if

to explain these events would involve us in a sympathetic identification with the oppressor,

as if to understand these events would involve building a justificatory framework for them’

( p. 8). Both kinds of frames limit discussions of the origins of violence and the cultural

conditions necessary to produce them. The problematic outcome of this type of imagery is

the denial of complex social and cultural contexts and the constriction of possibilities in the

realm of alternative US drug policies. Significantly, this denial reinforces a critical absence

in the American cultural vocabulary, a discursive gap in fundamental understandings of

the relationship between individuals and structure, at precisely the point where alternativeframeworks for understanding drugs might arise. But, I would argue, in locating the gap

within this massive social contradiction, a useful, albeit provisional, analytical window

appears ‘in the tension between how we live and what our culture allows us to say’, a site

from which we might begin to ‘hope for the reappropriation of a common language in

which those dilemmas can be discussed’ (Bellah, 1986: vii).

From such a perspective, social denial and its cultural logics are not impermeable nor

invulnerable, as the complex ongoing contests which undergird culture always prove.

There is ample evidence in mainstream representation of complicating tendencies in

the presentation of drug discourse: largely (and surprisingly) because the presence of

discursive gaps is inherently troubling and demands attention, particularly as genres evolve,

conventions become subject to revision, and alternative narrative structures emerge.

As images approach ahistorical status, the very denial of their social context pushes

production into a confrontation with the complexity of reality, providing the possibility for

the emergence of a film like Traffic or a series like The Wire after a long cycle of easy cultural

demonization. Culturally, then, these images of drug wars, their warriors and enemies are

perpetually problematized by the very vocabularies and logics that sustain them. For these

reasons, discursive gaps serve as strategical research sites in cultural and criminological

analysis; sites where poverty, inequality, sovereignty, and criminality are continuously

conjugated across late modernity through representations which reveal how we work

through the troubled place of the social. In the case of drug discourse, it is through the lens

of individualism that A Clear and Present Danger and Traffic teach us war’s futilities. It is




19/20


also through this lens that they always teach us of its possibility, its beckoning promise of

vindication and justice, but only on individual, never social terms. These representations find

themselves teetering precariously, on the verge of an awareness that ‘radical individualism

as a language obscures the fact that we find ourselves not independently of other people

and institutions but through them’ (Bellah, 1986: 84). As complex and contradictory as

that path may be, it is one worth taking – one which imposes a relentless confrontation

with the kinds of cultural ambiguity that, as in The Wire, introduce intractable narrative

tensions and open up discursive gaps that cannot be easily closed off. In this way, visions

of change and alternative possibilities as much as the politics of stasis and prohibition are

built into attempts at discursive closings, which are always caught in a double gesture,

reaffirming and denying, damning and redeeming.

NotesI would like to thank Bruce Hoffman, Barbara Klinger, Steve Rubinstein, Lynn Chancer, and the CMC

editorial staff and reviewers, including Chris Greer and Yvonne Jewkes, for their insightful comments

on earlier drafts of this article. And a special note of thanks to CMC Editor, Jeff Ferrell, for his

intellectual mentorship and support.

1 ‘Drug Czar Cancels Misleading “Drugs and Terrorism” Ad Campaign’, 3 April 2003. Available

at the Drug Policy Alliance website: http://www.drugpolicy.org/news/pressroom/pressrelease/

pr040303.cfm.

2 ‘Drug Users Demonized by Hurricane Coverage’, 9 September 2005. Available at the Drug Policy

Alliance website: http://www.drugpolicy.org/news/090905hurricane.cfm.

References

Baum, Dan (1996) Smoke and Mirrors: The War on Drugs and the Politics of Failure. New York:

Little, Brown and Company.

Baumon, Zygmunt (1998) Globalization: The Human Consequences. Cambridge: Polity Press.

Beck, Ulrich (1992) Risk Society: Towards a New Modernity. London: SAGE Publications.

Beckett, Katherine (1997) Making Crime Pay: Law and Order in Contemporary American Politics.

New York: Oxford University Press.Bellah, Robert Neelly (1986) Habits of the Heart: Individualism and Commitment in American Life.

New York: Harper & Row.

Bennett, William J., John J. DiIulio, Jr. and John P. Walters (1999) Body Count: Moral Poverty … and

How to Win America’s War Against Crime and Drugs. New York: Simon and Schuster.

Bourdieu, Pierre (1977) Outline of a Theory of Practice. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Butler, Judith (2004) Precarious Life: The Powers of Mourning and Violence. New York: Verso.

Chomsky, Noam (2002) Manufacturing Consent: The Political Economy of Mass Media. New York:

Pantheon.

Clancy, Tom (1990) Clear and Present Danger. London: HarperCollins.

Cohen, Stanley (1972) Folk Devils and Moral Panics. London: Macgibbon and Kee.Duke, Steven B. and Albert C. Gross (1993) America’s Longest War: Rethinking our Tragic Crusade

Against Drugs. New York: Putnam.




20/20


Duster, Troy (1997) ‘Pattern, Purpose, and Race in the Drug War: The Crisis of Credibility in Criminal

Justice’, in Craig Reinarma and Harry G. Levine (eds) Crack in America: Demon Drugs and Social

Justice, pp. 260 – 87. Los Angeles: University of California Press.

Garland, David (2001) The Culture of Control. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Giddens, Anthony (1990) The Consequences of Modernity. Oxford: Polity Press.Girling, Evi, Ian Loader and Richard Sparks (1999) Crime and Social Change in Middle England:

Questions of Order in an English Town. New York: Routledge.

Gray, Mike (1998) Drug Crazy: How We Got into This Mess and How We Can Get Out . New York:

Random House.

Hall, Stuart (1980). ‘Encoding/Decoding’, in Stuart Hall, Dorothy Hobson, Andrew Love and Paul

Willis (eds), Culture, Media, Language, pp. 128 – 38. London: Hutchinson.

Hall, Stuart, C. Critcher, T. Jefferson and B. Roberts (1978) Policing the Crisis: Mugging, the State,

and Law and Order . London: Macmillan.

Kelling, George (1996) Fixing Broken Windows: Restoring Order and Reducing Crime in Our

Communities. New York: Free Press.

Lenson, David (1995) On Drugs. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press.

McChesney, Robert (1999) Rich Media, Poor Democracy: Communication Politics in Dubious Times.

New York: New Press.

McRobbie, Angela and Sarah L. Thornton (1995) ‘Rethinking “Moral Panic” for Multi-mediated

Social Worlds’, British Journal of Sociology 46 (4): 559 – 74.

Manning, Peter K. (1998) ‘Media Loops’, in Frankie Bailey and Donna Hale (eds) Popular Culture,

Crime and Justice, pp. 25 – 39. Belmont, CA: West/Wadsworth.

Mauer, Marc (1999) Race to Incarcerate. New York: New Press.

Naim, Moises (2005) Illicit: How Smugglers, Traffickers and Copycats Are Hijacking the Global

Economy. New York: Doubleday.

Pfohl, Stephen (1994) Images of Deviance and Social Control: A Sociological History. New York:

McGraw - Hill.

Rafter, Nicole Hahn (2006) Shots in the Mirror: Crime Films and Society , 2nd edn. Oxford: Oxford

University Press.

Reinarman, Craig and Harry G. Levine (eds) (1997) Crack in America: Demon Drugs and Social

Justice. Los Angeles: University of California Press.

Rogin, Michael (1987) Ronald Reagan: The Movie. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press.

Sarat, Austin (2001) When the State Kills: Capital Punishment and the American Condition.

Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.

Simon, David (2004) ‘Introduction’, in Rafael Alvarez The Wire. New York: Pocket Books.

Simon, David and George Pelecanos (2004) Interview by Terry Gross, 23 September.Surette, Ray (1992) Media, Crime, and Criminal Justice: Images and Realities. Pacific Grove, CA:

Brooks/Cole.

Van Schendel, Willem and Itty Abraham (eds) (2005) Illicit Flows and Criminal Things: States,

Borders and the Other Side of Globalization. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press.

Wynne, Brian (1996) ‘May the Sheep Safely Graze? A Reflexive View of Expert – Lay Knowledge

Divide’, in Scott Lash, Bronislaw Szerszynski and Brian Wynne (eds) Risk, Environment and

Modernity: Towards a New Ecology, pp. 44 – 83. Beverly Hills, CA: SAGE Publications.

Young, Alison (1996) Imagining Crime. Thousand Oaks, CA: SAGE Publications.

Young, Jock (1971) The Drug Takers: The Social Meaning of Drug Use. London: MacGibbon and Kee.

MICHELLE BROWN,

Assistant Professor, Department of Sociology and Anthropology,

Ohio University, Athens, USA. Email: [email protected]

Crime Media Culture, 2007

Documents

Transcript of Crime Media Culture, 2007