Abstract
Throughout Meth Wars: Police, Media, Power, Travis Linnemann skillfully describes how the United States constructs social imaginaries. He focuses particularly on the methamphetamine imaginary and how individuals and communities view methamphetamine within their social world. He discusses how individuals, police, media, and politics contribute to the socially constructed idea of drugs. Linnemann enhances his argument by incorporating popular media, such as television series, movies, and news sources. He explains how these drug and crime portrayals culturally construct ideas surrounding methamphetamine, and he proceeds to dismantle these ideologies.
Linnemann begins with the popular show Breaking Bad and identifies key themes of social class, poverty, and race that are overshadowed by methamphetamine. He compares the social context and activities of Walter White to those in the United States and convincingly demonstrates how this television series helps develop the methamphetamine imaginary. After incorporating this popular media example, he turns our attention to anti-meth campaigns throughout the United States. These include Faces of Meth and the Meth Project. He emphasizes how these campaigns invoke fear and create a powerful connection between viewers and the drug, thus fueling the methamphetamine imaginary. Within these campaigns, Linnemann identifies many instances of class-based understandings of race and urges the reader to rethink race and class hierarchies as they pertain to drugs and crime.
Linnemann proceeds to discuss cultural work performed by police officers and politicians. He interviews police officers in rural and urban settings. After comparing these qualitative interviews, there is evidence of a cultural production of space—rural versus urban—as well as the cultural production of a methamphetamine imaginary. He makes the case that police are everyday cultural reproducers, and this is enhanced by a political emphasis on the methamphetamine epidemic.
Linnemann concludes the book by detailing how the war on drugs is conflated with the war on terrorism. He relates political rhetoric about the drug war to the rhetoric about the war on terror, including key events related to El Chapo and the Sinaloa Cartel. Linnemann has insightful comparisons thatquestion the economic and geographic agenda of the United States and the role narco-terrorism plays in this agenda.
Meth Wars: Police, Media, Power can reach a wide variety of individuals, ranging from policy-makers to police officers to cultural criminologists. The book incorporates topics that span multiple areas, including law enforcement, politics, pop culture, rural sociology, and cultural criminology.