Abstract
Over the past several years, Travis Linnemann has established himself as one of the most important analysts of methamphetamine working in the United States. His prize-winning article with Travis Wall, “‘This is Your Face on Meth’: The Punitive Spectacle of ‘White Trash’ and the Rural War on Drugs,” is essential reading for anyone trying to understand methamphetamine in the 21st century (Linneman and Wall, 2013). Meth Wars: Police, Media, Power, extends this work even further. It covers sites of meth-related meaning making ranging from the television show, Breaking Bad, to debates over meth in the Kansas state legislature, to representations of meth use by anti-meth campaigns, police officers, and meth users themselves. To bring a sense of cohesion to this wide-ranging analysis, Linnemann introduces the concept of the “methamphetamine imaginary.” This imaginary “encompasses the many ways in which methamphetamine mediates the social world—how individuals imagine themselves and their relations to one another through this particular drug” (p. 5). For Linneman, this imaginary is “the taken-for-granted, commonsense knowledge and everyday affects that surround methamphetamine, its users, and those who are concerned with controlling, treating, and punishing both” (Linneman and Wall, 2013). This methamphetamine imaginary is part of a broader “drug-war imaginary” that is likewise produced and sustained by a broad swath of cultural production taking place in media, politics, and everyday life, which is then implicated in governing strategies that draw on and perpetuate the politics of fear and insecurity.
The first chapter deals with what is likely the primary reference point for many readers’ understanding of methamphetamine (at least in the United States), the hit television show, Breaking Bad. Breaking Bad is the story of Walter White: a high school chemistry teacher who becomes a prominent meth cook after receiving a dire cancer diagnosis. Chapter two examines how methamphetamine has been racialized as a “white trash” drug. Chapter three explores methamphetamine as a site of governance, a tool through which state power is extended. Chapter four looks at meth and policing, with a particular focus on rural police. Chapter five looks at how methamphetamine is reshaping understandings of rurality itself within the United States. Chapter six considers the international dimensions of the drug war, with a particular focus on “narcoterror.”
Proceeding in this way, Linnemann makes a compelling case that the war on drugs, of which the concern with meth is just the latest iteration, is not just a policy concern, but a key site of cultural production sustaining political life in the contemporary United States. Indeed, for Linnemann, the drug war’s status as a policy concern cannot be fully understood apart from an appreciation of its constitutive role in US culture. To this end, Meth Wars is neither a proposal for how to improve US drug policy nor one more critique of the drug war’s failures and excesses. Rather, it is an exploration of a different line of thought. As Linnemann phrases it: “What if we need the drug war?” This is the question that opens and closes the book. And with it, Linnemann is not asking if the war on drugs is practically necessary, but whether the cultural work it performs is needed to sustain contemporary life. And Linnemann’s answer seems to be that, yes, we do need the drug war to perform this role. For it is through the drug war that certain aspects of contemporary life are rendered thinkable. It is what allows us, for instance, to understand and empathize with the character of Walter White in Breaking Bad when he decides to start producing meth as a solution to the financial concerns that follow his cancer diagnosis. “Methamphetamine is the fetish that negates more difficult questions,” Linneman states (p. 42). Such questions include: “Why was a family that seemed to live well within its means stretched so thin? Why did Walt’s teacher salary not go further? Why did a modest and dedicated public servant not simply have adequate health care and life insurance?” (p. 42). All of these facts are the precondition for Walt’s shift into the role of meth producer. And the show works precisely because poor teacher pay, unequal access to healthcare, and other inequities are familiar and accepted features of contemporary American life.
Linnemann’s analysis shows similar patterns regarding understandings of race and class; policing and police power; the proper role of government (federal, state, and local); media, representation, and crime; and international relations. So engrained is the drug war imaginary, according to Linnemann, that even critics of the war on drugs are themselves dependent on its perpetuation.
Given this framing, methamphetamine appears as just one more chapter in the ongoing story of the US war on drugs. This story has proven remarkably enduring, weathering social, political, and cultural changes to become a key part of the American story itself. What was once novel is now a taken for granted feature of everyday life. And those spaces that once seemed immune from drug problems—the bucolic havens of rural and small town America—have proven just as susceptible. Drug war critics may thus wonder what space Linnemann’s analysis leaves for alternatives: for imagining a new imaginary, as it were, that does not perpetuate the same harms, inequities, and misunderstandings as before. Linnemann himself does not directly answer this question. However, his analysis is reminiscent of Angela Y. Davis’s discussion of prison abolition, and her response to those who find it difficult to imagine life without the prison (Davis, 2003). For Davis, this is precisely the point: the prison has become so fundamental to our thinking that we cannot imagine life without it. Imagining a world with no prisons is therefore not about concocting some new institution to take its place, but of rethinking the broader ecology of institutions and issues sustained in their current arrangement by the prison’s existence.
The same might be said of the war on drugs: by showing just how widely the drug war imaginary reaches, Linnemann has mapped the terrain that would need to change for there to be a substantive departure from the current drug war. So it is not just a matter of shifting from punishment to treatment, or replacing punitive prohibitionism with harm reduction, or legalizing some or even all drugs (though these might all play a role). Rather, it is about recognizing just how deeply implicated in the drug war our common sense understandings of everyday life have become, and starting the hard work of weaning ourselves off such psychic dependencies.