Abstract
Meth Wars: Police, Media, Power is Travis Linnemann’s first monograph, and readers familiar with his work will not be disappointed with it. Let me start with my initial impressions having read it through a couple of times: it’s exceptional. It has reminded me why – before anything else – I consider myself to be a cultural criminologist. It is a shining example of the ways in which criminology ought to be done. Reviewing it is no easy task, but it is certainly a pleasure to attempt it.
In essence, the text is concerned with what the author calls the ‘methamphetamine imaginary’. By this he means the ways in which people think, talk, act, know stuff and do things around this drug. Imaginary is not understood as standing in opposition to the material realm, but rather as a way to understand and map out the materiality of methamphetamine across the social world. From the accounts and practices of users and sellers, to the on-going regulatory efforts of various agencies of control, through the multiple representations of both to be found in various popular cultural forms, the goal remains constant – to chart how it is that this drug can help us understand the workings of contemporary society. More specifically, how power comes to work in and through it, as it does the drug war more generally. The author states: ‘my aim here is to broadly theorize the ways in which the methamphetamine and drug-war imaginaries are at work within a boundless governing strategy encompassing foreign and domestic, local and global’ (p. 13).
To understand and theorise methamphetamine in the way this text does is no simple matter. This becomes evident quite quickly when the depth and variety found within the book’s analyses are considered. The opening chapter engages with contemporary and classical psychoanalytic theory to present AMC’s hit TV show Breaking Bad – which is quite possibly the best-known meth story ever told – as a metaphor for the death drive at the heart of American life under late capitalism. Chapter 2 develops the emerging field of visual criminology through the anti-meth advertising campaigns that involved ‘before and after’ mugshots being displayed on billboards. This process is comprehensively linked by Linnemann to the construction of contemporary Whiteness. Chapter 3 takes a different approach by outlining the ways in which governmental actors harness news media sources through a process of ‘political problematization’ (p. 20) of the methamphetamine imaginary. Chapter 4 differs yet again – here ethnographic fieldwork forms the basis of an exemplary account of the ways in which the policing of rural meth use forms the basis of a ‘narrative of decline’ in rural communities underpinned by this drug. Crucially, it is this narrative that supports, facilitates and legitimises the hostile evolution of policing in this context. Chapter 5 then uses the teachings of cultural geography in its efforts to theorise the spaces and places of meth use away from the city, and then finally Chapter 6 internationalises the volume by positioning the meth war as the latest evolution of the on-going ‘border security’ project of the neoliberal Right. From theoretical psychoanalysis to geo-politics and back again, the intellectual depth of the volume is little less than outstanding. Again, this is criminology done right.
There is a lot to digest in this book, and this makes drilling down into small sections of it for the purposes of this review more than a little problematic. However, I think it is worth recounting a couple of Linnemann’s key ideas here as indicative of the strength of this text, but also the power and heuristic potential of this type of criminological analysis. The first of these is his critical reading of Breaking Bad. For my mind, this is where Linnemann is at his best – and it is through this analysis of Breaking Bad as a cultural text that he cements his position as a leader in this field. Necessarily summarised, his reading of this show is predicated upon a part psychoanalytic, part Žižekian understanding of it as emblematic of the death drive that underpins life in the late modern US. He poses a set of questions about this show, and why it is that everyone from the seasoned fan to the person who has never even seen a single episode knows that it is basically about methamphetamine. When, perhaps it is not?
Linnemann goes on to argue that Breaking Bad is potentially just as much about the precarious insecurity of daily life for many US citizens as it is about methamphetamine. Jobs don’t pay enough to provide for families (even middle class ones like school teachers), relationships don’t provide the physical, emotional or sexual fulfilment that they used to and terminal diseases are an ever-present threat. Walter White – like the rest of us – knows this to be the case, but in an act of what Žižek calls fetishistic disavowal, he denies it to be true so he can carry on regardless. In this respect then, maybe the show is not so much about methamphetamine as being the reason why Walter does what he does, as about why exactly he was in the position to have to do so in the first place. Faced with his economic precariousness and terminal diagnosis combined, how much ‘choice’ did he really have? This question of choice matters here, because in embarking upon (and then in the process embracing) a course of action that ultimately results in his death upon his own terms, does Walter not manage to transcend the futility of his predicament? Linnemann suggests with some authority that this process is emblematic of the drug war at large within the malaise of the contemporary US: we can understand the drug war as the death of our own design, engineering again and again, displacing, if only for a moment, the unavoidable inequalities of life under late capitalism and the certainties of human morality. The drug war is a death wish. (p. 42; emphasis in original)
Here once more, this text is right at criminology’s cutting edge.
In addition to the above, however, another key strength of this book is the way in which it connects the localised and globalised dynamics at work within the methamphetamine imaginary. To understand drugs, it is often argued that we need to think about them through the discourses of globalisation. One of the neatest things about Meth Wars is the way in which Linnemann puts this in to practice. Having already established the links between meth scares and wider political workings, the last substantive chapter of the text outlines how this can be understood on both a local and global scale. That is, Linnemann argues persuasively that the observations of rural police in Kansas that ‘Mexican meth’ had arrived on their streets, and the increasing militarisation of US-Mexican border control are more subtly connected than they might initially appear. Methamphetamine is not the causal link in these two developments, but rather its imaginary facilitates their concurrent development as two distinct but inextricably linked features of the same governmental/politico-economic process. And then, crucially, it is this process at work that enables us to theorise geopolitical developments in new ways. As the author exemplifies, ‘we can see that the methamphetamine imaginary is an important part of a discursive and material regime that mobilizes state power, thereby shaping and animating the physical boundaries between nations’ (p. 179). Again, this is genuinely progressive criminological thinking; it cuts right to the core of the geographic, economic, social and political hearts of its subject matter.
In summary, I don’t mind repeating myself and asserting one last time that I think this is an exceptional piece of work that the author should be highly commended for. Are there some points within it that I disagree with? Of course there are – we read Breaking Bad quite differently for a start – but are these enough for me to start trying to pick holes in Linnemann’s arguments here? Not even close. There is a good reason for this too; the author invites critical thinking and engagement with his subject matter for sure, but at no point does he invite confrontation with it. This is refreshing, and it is one of the most charming things about the book. It is written with passion, flair, style and verve, but there are no sniping put-downs, no intellectual low-blows and none of the general hostility that so often characterises our field. The author just gets on with making his case, and it is masterfully done. I can’t recommend this text to interested readers enough.