It took only a few days in November 2009 for mephedrone to go from a relatively unknown substance to the UK’s public enemy number one.
‘The spectre of344 a Christmas killer is a synthetic substance called mephedrone’, warned the Northern Echo in true penny-dreadful style, describing how police in County Durham had been dealing with a rash of teenagers being hospitalised after using the new drug.
Over the course of a month, reports of young mephedrone users, from remote Scottish backwaters to the leafy Home Counties, began popping up across Britain. On 24 November, four days after the Northern Echo story, the Daily Mail revealed that fourteen-year-old Woking schoolgirl Gabrielle Price 345 had died after taking mephedrone at a house party in Brighton. Two days later, a well-respected news agency sent round an eye-watering story about an unnamed teenager from Durham who had been hospitalised after taking mephedrone, headlined ‘USER RIPS OFF SCROTUM ON LEGAL DRUG,’346 which was subsequently (and unsurprisingly) picked up by the national press. Meanwhile, the story of Finn, the Cockfield boy we met in Chapter 1, was repeated in newspapers as far away as South Africa and New Zealand.
A report that appeared in the Sun, Daily Mail, Telegraph and Metro revealed that 180 pupils,347 had been off sick from a Leicestershire school after taking mephedrone. Then, eight days later, two Scunthorpe teenagers, Louis Wainwright and Nicholas Smith, were reported to have died after overdosing on the drug. The tragedy appeared all over the press. One of the boy’s heartbroken parents called for the drug to be banned, telling the BBC348 ‘he would be alive if the ban was in place’.
In a story headlined ‘KIDS349 DEADLY COCKTAIL MIX’, the Sun highlighted a claim from a drug worker that dealers were mixing mephedrone with crystal meth to get children hooked. The Daily Star labelled the drug ‘the powder of death350’, stating that ‘90 per cent of Liverpool351 were taking it, and that South African crime gangs were busy stockpiling the drug to meet demand among fans at the 2010 World Cup352.
With the whiff of a fresh drug scare hanging in the air, the tabloid press had cranked its creaking ‘drug craze’ machinery into action. ‘Meow meow’ was a nickname unfamiliar to most mephedrone users, but one that newspapers latched on to. By March 2010, the Sun was printing an average of two ‘meow meow’ stories a day, and had kicked off a ‘BAN MEOW NOW’353 campaign. The pressure to prohibit Britain’s latest ‘killer drug’, as the paper called it, was sent into overdrive as the terrifying reports kept flooding in.
Over thirty-nine days, from 8 March, when the ‘180 school-kids off sick’ story broke, the national press printed 210 articles devoted to the drug, a third of which appeared in the Sun, Britain’s bestselling newspaper. The tabloid tales were given added gravity when the government’s own drug advisory body, the ACMD, reported354 that the drug could have been linked to twenty-six further deaths in Britain.
On 16 April the Labour government took action, and in a move claimed as a ‘major victory’355 by the Sun, banned mephedrone, classifying it as a Class B substance. The decision was undoubtedly a sensible one. Mephedrone was a cheap, potent, unpredictable substance that children and teenagers could buy easily and take anywhere. Job done.
Except that, when the dust had settled, it transpired that most of the big-hitting mephedrone stories reported in the press were not true.
The source for the ‘scrotum-ripping’ story, for example, was discovered to be a post on a mephedrone chat site. The owner of the website, mephedrone.com, said it was ‘a joke’. A spokeswoman for Leicestershire356 County Council denied reports of the 180 sick pupils, stating: ‘those figures don’t relate to any school in Leicestershire’. The police and the local newspaper blamed each other357 for the fake story. Embarrassingly for the Humberside police officer who had briefed the press about the deaths of the two Scunthorpe boys, a coroner’s report later revealed they had in fact died after drinking alcohol and taking the similar-sounding heroin substitute methadone. Many other reports, including the fatalities associated with the drug identified by the ACMD, were found to be unsubstantiated. Subsequent toxicology tests showed that most of those deaths were not caused by mephedrone. In fact in 2010, in England and Wales, there were just six deaths358 where mephedrone was mentioned on the death certificate. Few newspapers bothered correcting their facts.
As the science journalist Nic Fleming argued, the legislation banning ‘meow meow’ was prompted by a mixture of ‘inaccurate and hysterical journalism,359 the advice of a scientific committee weakened by confrontation with ministers, and a government so desperate to be loved it would have done practically anything the press demanded’.
Three days after the decision was made to ban mephedrone, two members of the ACMD, who had warned against the measure, resigned in protest. In a letter to the Home Secretary, drug treatment expert Eric Carlin360 said the ACMD’s advice to the government to ban mephedrone ‘was unduly based on media and political pressure’.
In Crime, Policy and the Media, a book by Jon Silverman,361 professor of media and criminal justice at the University of Bedfordshire, the former Home Secretary Alan Johnson explained: ‘The reason we hurried up banning mephedrone was, firstly, a lot of newspaper stories … but also an election was coming – we wanted to get it through Parliament.’
Asked by Silverman whether there was a desire to show the media ahead of the election that the government was being ‘tough’ on drugs, Johnson said: ‘Well, you never know whether there are other considerations … I like to think it was the importance of getting the ban on the statute book.’
Not only did the ‘inaccurate and hysterical’ press coverage end with a questionable change to the law, it could be said it prompted exactly the wrong response. Sales of mephedrone actually increased during the media campaign.
During the blaze of publicity in newspapers and on TV between November 2009 and April 2010, analysis of Google362 statistics showed the number of searches for ‘mephedrone’ ‘drone’ and ‘meow meow’ spiralled, as did queries about the drug in online drug forums. And it was clearly not just worried parents looking for help. According to a survey by music magazine Mixmag,363 in a matter of months mephedrone had been transformed into one of the most popular drugs among young clubbers.
Online mephedrone sellers were so inundated by new custom in March and April that they ran out of stock. One major London-based dealer said: ‘Since all the stuff in the papers about meph, it’s more of a money-spinner than ever. I’ve had to order in bulk.’
But just two weeks after the government announced the decision to ban mephedrone, the Sun published a story on a new legal high called NRG-1: ‘NRG-1 IS 25P A HIT AND WILL KILL MANY MORE THAN MEOW MEOW’,364 adding that the substance would lead to ‘enough mass brain damage and death … to fill an Olympic stadium’. And so it continued.
Around twelve million newspapers365 are sold every day. Polling data from Ipsos MORI in 2007 showed that six out of ten people who ‘knew something about illegal drugs’ cited ‘the media’ as their primary source of information; three times as many as cited ‘government public health campaigns’. But the subject of illegal drugs is vulnerable to sensationalism, scapegoating and misinformation. It is seemingly one of a select group of subjects in which emergency reporting powers are enacted to give journalists, in the face of a common ‘evil’, a licence to play fast and loose with the facts. The media is a dominant carrier of the contagion we describe in this book as narcomania, a self-perpetuating cycle of confusion, ignorance and misinformation.
When it comes to reporting on drugs, the print media, arguably the most powerful quarter of the Fourth Estate, can be said to be influenced by three interconnected agendas, above and beyond their remit to report the objective truth: a need to sell newspapers, a desire to keep their readers happy, and an incentive to reflect the prevailing political and moral outlook.
The Fourth Estate has historically played the role of a mouthpiece to government when it comes to influencing behaviour. Unlike politicians, newspapers have the ability to reach the common man and Middle England. In the past, broadsheets and tabloids have not only reflected public opinion, but have been used by governments to rally the country to war and bind communities with common narratives, and their role has also been harnessed to define acceptable behaviour.
These loyal, paying readerships, which have been carefully groomed by newspapers over the decades and in some cases centuries, have become hugely powerful weapons for editors. In return for being so charmed, readers buy into the newspaper’s ideology – providing newspaper editors with a fully signed up moral army, a guaranteed, voting readership of wealthy, middle-class taxpayers – and the government has to listen. The balance of power between government and newspapers has tipped in favour of the Fourth Estate. It is because of this that, regardless of the reality, newspapers set the parameters for political debate. This relationship between the press, its readers and political elite is one that until recently has rarely been aired.
Facing the Leveson Inquiry in 2012, set up to investigate the culture, practices and ethics of the British press, Daily Mail editor Paul Dacre defended his paper’s scrutiny of the misdemeanours of public figures by quoting Tim Luckhurst,366 a journalism professor at Kent University, on privacy and freedom of expression. Luckhurst had outlined the tryst the press has with the status quo of the day to infuse news with a moral tone, to guide British citizens away from temptations of vice:
In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, British philosophers developed a concept called the ‘sanction of public opinion’. They concluded that popular morality should not ban infidelity or imprison men for betraying their wives, but it could create an incentive to behave responsibly. People tempted to stray might be persuaded to think again by the certainty that their friends and neighbours would think less of them.
Sanctioned to guide the British public over their sexual mores, appetite for intoxicants and the threat posed by the deviant and foreign to mainstream society, the press has played its part in sparking waves of moral panic with each new drug that has entered mass use within the UK, from opium to cocaine. These messages play to the fears of an island nation, to protect its borders from a foreign threat, but they also seek to underpin British values of hard work, honesty and thrift. And the press’s loyalty to the narrative is well rewarded.
Not only do the British public want to know the details of their neighbours’ private lives, they are prepared to pay every day for lurid tales of the unwanted and dispossessed, the gruesome and the criminal. Journalists even have a phrase for the kind of stories that middle-class readers love to be shocked by at the breakfast table: ‘marmalade droppers’.
Drug stories sell newspapers. To the writer Will Self, the drug story is chiefly an excuse for cheap voyeurism. ‘There’s an appetite for what I call “drug pornography367”,’ he has said. ‘Lots of people who would never dream of taking drugs get a vicarious kick out of the exposure to other people’s abandonment. That’s why imagery of people using drugs sells papers.’ Newspaper editors are well aware of the human drama of a drug story, and its capacity to shock, scare, and provide a window into an unfamiliar yet strangely fascinating world. Newspapers play on the fact that most parents are worried about their children getting into drugs.
After cannabis had been reclassified from a Class B to a Class C drug in 2004, the tabloid press filled hundreds of column inches with exaggerated scare stories about the drug, particularly about its more potent strain, skunk, which was being grown on cannabis farms throughout Britain and had overtaken hashish to dominate the market. At the height of the panic about skunk in 2007, newspapers informed readers of the threats. The Liverpool Echo warned of ‘Super-strength cannabis so potent that just one puff368 can cause schizophrenia’, while the Daily Mail argued that ‘smoking just one369 cannabis joint raises the danger of mental illness by 40 per cent’.
Not only could smoking cannabis jeopardise your mental health, it could also turn you into a killer. In 2002, shortly after David Blunkett had announced his intention to reclassify cannabis to a Class C drug, the national press covered the horrific case of Mathew Hardman, a satanic vampire fantasist who brutally murdered a ninety-year-old woman. The Daily Mail published the story under the headline: ‘THE VAMPIRE MURDERER WHOSE MIND WAS WARPED BY CANNABIS’370. During Hardman’s trial it was mentioned by one witness that Hardman had once smoked cannabis, a detail deemed unimportant by every other agency.
To the opponents of drug law reform, cannabis is a key drug. It is seen as the thin end of the wedge: if laws and attitudes become relaxed on cannabis, so too will they become on ecstasy, cocaine and the rest. If teenagers start smoking cannabis, they will progress to using Class A drugs. Cannabis represents a front line in their battle against any kind of liberalisation. As a result, its image as a ‘soft’ drug no worse than tobacco or alcohol is attacked with vigour. It leads you to hard drugs, it makes you mad, and it makes you kill.
The Mail has published a string of stories linking cannabis to acute mental health problems and extreme acts of violence, gleaned largely from cases where defendants plead diminished responsibility on account of smoking the drug.
Despite claims made in papers such as the Mail about cannabis’s ability to cause mental health problems, the scientific evidence is not so conclusive. The ACMD found a ‘probable but weak371 causal link between psychotic illness and cannabis use’, while drug information charity DrugScope has concluded: ‘Psychologically, use of cannabis372 has been reported to cause anxiety and paranoia in some users and may in rarer cases be a trigger for underlying mental health problems. Some research has suggested that cannabis can stimulate mental health disorders such as schizophrenia.’
But there is little evidence to back claims that cannabis, or its long-term effects, can trigger violence. Virtually every piece of research carried out in the last forty-five years debunks the ‘cannabis causes violence’ myth.
Two of the most quoted studies into the links between cannabis, mental health and violence, carried out among 1,000 young adults in New Zealand373 and published in 2000 and 2002, have been used as major planks by the Daily Mail columnist Melanie Phillips, in the ‘cannabis causes aggression’ argument.
Dr Louise Arseneault,374 the lead author on both studies, says her work has been misrepresented: ‘We found that people dependent on cannabis375 were more likely to commit violent crime. But to say our studies showed that cannabis itself caused violence is wrong. We found that it was not the substance that caused the violence, it was more related to the user’s past history and circumstance. To say the paranoia created by smoking cannabis makes you more likely to be violent is a bold claim,’ she says, ‘there is no evidence for this.’
The Daily Mail’s claims are not without precedent. Reefer Madness is an anti-marijuana propaganda film first broadcast in the US in 1936. It begins with a teacher warning pupils and their parents against the dangers of marijuana, relating the story of a group of students whose lives swiftly descend into mayhem and murder after they smoke ‘reefers’ and listen to jazz. By the end of the cautionary tale, Jimmy has killed a pedestrian while driving ‘high’, Jack has shot Mary, Ralph has beaten Jack to death in a fit of insanity, and Blanche has committed suicide.
But it isn’t just the tabloids that have issued overblown warnings against the dangers of cannabis. In March 2007 the Independent on Sunday published a front page headlined: ‘Cannabis: An Apology’. It said: ‘In 1997 this newspaper launched a campaign to decriminalise the drug. If only we had known then what we can reveal today.’ Unfortunately what the paper revealed were some very shaky facts. By taking the most potent form of cannabis available and comparing it to the weakest a decade ago, the paper declared the drug was ‘twenty-five times’ stronger than it was in the 1990s. As with many of the scare stories about skunk, the facts were less dramatic. According to forensic analysis, the average cannabis joint376 is now approximately twice the strength of the average 1970s joint.
It is not just dubious conclusions that are being drawn. The British press are also anxious to warn us of the threat of new drugs – and have done so with considerable success, despite the questionable veracity of the warning. Throughout the 2000s media outlets were desperate to be the first to herald Britain’s crystal meth epidemic. As one Sun journalist said when quizzed on why the paper was printing another ‘false dawn’ crystal meth story in 2011: ‘I know there hasn’t been a significant rise in crystal meth use, but the stories fill column inches377. We’ve been talking about heroin and crack since the 80s, people want to hear about something new – and it’s a good opportunity to reprint those “before and after” images of the American crystal meth378 addicts.’
The idea that what happens in America – crystal meth has had a catastrophic impact in many parts of the country – will also happen here is a scare story that has been gleefully pursued by the supposedly more respectable media as well. An ITV documentary entitled London’s Most Dangerous Drug in 2005 and a full front-page story in the Independent, ‘CRYSTAL METH: BRITAIN’S DEADLIEST DRUG PROBLEM’, in 2007 both gained much attention, despite the fact that their research showed that the drug was nothing more than a faint blip on police and drug-use statistics. Between 2007 and 2008 Home Office figures show there were less than fifty379 seizures of crystal meth, compared to over 7,000 seizures of crack cocaine. The British Crime Survey in 2008 revealed 0.1 per cent of people questioned about their drug use in the past month had used crystal meth, with the figure falling to zero380 in the 2010–11 survey.
What role do journalists themselves play? How much do they know of the drug world? In an interview with Guardian journalist Nick Davies, former Sun showbiz reporter Sean Hoare381 said: ‘I was paid to go out and take drugs with rock stars – get drunk with them, take pills with them, take cocaine with them. It was so competitive. You are going to go beyond the call of duty. You are going to do things that no sane man would do. You’re in a machine.’
‘He made no secret of his massive ingestion of drugs,’ wrote Davies. ‘He told me how he used to start the day with “a rock star’s breakfast” – a line of cocaine and a Jack Daniel’s – usually in the company of a journalist who now occupies a senior position at the Sun. He reckoned he was using three grams of cocaine a day, spending about £1,000 a week … Looking back, he could see it had done him enormous damage. But at the time, as he recalled, most of his colleagues were doing it, too … It must have scared the rest of Fleet Street when he started talking – he had bought, sold and snorted cocaine with some of the most powerful names in tabloid journalism. One retains a senior position at the Daily Mirror. “I last saw him in Little Havana” [Hoare] recalled, “at three in the morning, on his hands and knees. He had lost his cocaine wrap. I said to him, ‘This is not really the behaviour we expect of a senior journalist from a great Labour paper.’ He said, ‘Have you got any fucking drugs?’”’
Journalists, especially young, up-and-coming reporters, are always looking for a big scoop with which to make their name. Urban decay and a broken society often prove fertile ground for gritty, award-winning investigations. In 1981 a young, tenacious Washington Post reporter named Janet Cooke was awarded a Pulitzer Prize for a heart-rending article called ‘Jimmy’s World’, about a black eight-year-old heroin addict who was regularly injected by his parents. Cooke described Jimmy’s dad Ron injecting his son: ‘He grabs Jimmy’s382 left arm just above the elbow, his massive hand tightly encircling the child’s small limb. The needle slides into the boy’s soft skin like a straw pushed into the center of a freshly baked cake.’ Cooke reported that Jimmy was not alone, that he was one of many child addicts and kids wrapped up in the drugs world.
The article prompted waves of outrage across America, with the police immediately launching a full-scale search for Jimmy. The Post’s famous assistant managing editor, Bob Woodward, submitted the article for the Pulitzer. But Jimmy could not be found. Two days after receiving the award, Cooke admitted her story was a fake and her newspaper had to issue a grovelling front-page apology.
The cause of the Post scandal, and the crux of how and why the media continues to get it wrong over drugs was eloquently described by sociologists Craig Reinarman and Ceres Duskin in an article titled: ‘Dominant Ideology and Drugs in the Media’,383 published in the International Journal on Drugs Policy in 1992.
‘These things were possible, we contend, precisely because America’s guardians of truth had no touchstone of truth on drug problems apart from their own scare stories. Editors seem to believe that readers don’t like to be reminded that there is something fundamentally wrong with the social system from which most of them benefit. Editors and readers alike feel more comfortable believing that the worsening horrors of our inner cities are caused by evil individuals from a different gene pool – addicts.’
They said Cooke’s article bypassed the usual filters of the newspaper editors and Pulitzer judges because they were rendered incapable of differentiating the truth from the myths and scare stories that had been built around the drug trade – by the media. That a family would have got the child they bathed, clothed and fed, addicted to drugs, that Jimmy would enjoy having a needle stuck in his arm or that impoverished, heavily addicted heroin users would give their drugs to a child should have raised some eyebrows. But it didn’t.
As Reinarman and Duskin pointed out during the intense and extensive seventeen-day search by police and Post reporters looking for Jimmy, ‘no one found any child addict – not an eight-year-old, not a ten-year-old, not a twelve-year-old. Stories that simply depict addicts as complicated, troubled human beings would be neither comforting enough for readers nor dramatic enough for prizes.
‘If the Post scandal has value,’ Reinarman and Duskin concluded, ‘it inheres in the accidental glimpse it affords into the normally hidden process by which media institutions force the untidy facts of social life through the sieve of dominant ideology. We submit that it is this process that allowed Cooke’s tale to sail undetected past Post editors, Pulitzer jurors, and the hundreds of other journalists who analysed the fraud. And we suggest that this process continues to camouflage the ways our world produces drug problems in the first place, and thereby helps to forge a public prepared to swallow the next junkie stereotype and to enlist in the next drug war.’
Fleet Street Fox, an anonymous journalist blogger and Twitter legend who has worked for the Sun, the Mail, the Guardian and the Mirror, says: ‘Most tabloids have384 the same attitude on drugs, “we don’t like them, they are bad,” otherwise you will lose readers. For newspapers it’s simple economics. You have to print what sells. On top of that a paper might have a political line because it is selling to that particular part of society. It’s how you sell advertising, how you present stories. That will affect the editor’s view, that’s why you are the editor, because you know your reader. You do what your readers want you to do. If you have a certain package you deliver, you don’t want to change it too much or you could risk it all.’
Whether it is the Sun or the Financial Times, drug stories are a staple of the British press, yet despite the huge coverage the issue receives, it remains one of the most misrepresented of all.
For most newspapers, the complex dilemmas of the drug trade are boiled down to a black and white realm of heroes and villains, good and evil, ne’er-do-wells and innocent victims. As the Guardian’s media commentator Roy Greenslade,385 a former editor of the Daily Mirror, puts it: ‘There are many complex dilemmas that are, to a popular newspaper editor, so straightforward that the solutions do not require a second thought. Among the most glaringly obvious is the matter of drugs. All drugs are evil. They threaten the orderliness of society. The people who supply them are scum.’ It is a view based on a presumption, of a composite picture of what the average, law-abiding, tabloid reader would probably think. ‘Drug culture challenges the status quo that journalists subconsciously seek to maintain,’ says Greenslade.
Newspaper editors are aware that to survive, they must give their customers what they want. British society is generally conservative and the outlook and readership of the popular press reflects that. Opinion polls on the public’s attitude to drugs show there is not a huge demand for the liberalisation of drug laws and certainly little support for legalisation. An ICM Research poll386 carried out in 2008 found 18 per cent of people questioned believed drugs laws are ‘not liberal enough’ compared to 32 per cent who said laws were ‘too liberal’. Two-thirds believe addicts arrested in possession of drugs should be sent to jail.
The two biggest selling newspapers in Britain in April 2012, the Sun (2.6 million copies a day) and the Daily Mail (1.9 million), have readerships dominated by Conservative voters. While the Sun’s readers are chiefly working-class people from a broad range of ages and regions, the Mail has a high number of middle-class readers living in the south of England. The Mail is the only paper read by more than 50 per cent women, and over half (60 per cent) of its readership is over fifty-five. The third biggest selling newspaper, the Metro (1.3 million) is owned by Associated Newspapers, also owners of the Mail. Because it is free, its readership is generalised, although the content is heavily influenced by its conservative stablemate.
The fourth and fifth biggest selling newspapers, the Daily Mirror (1.1 million), and the Daily Star (611,000), like the Sun, have a broad-ranging working-class readership, although the readers of both papers are chiefly Labour voters. The next four biggest selling papers, the Daily Telegraph (576,000), Daily Express (568,000), Times (393,000) and Financial Times (305,000) all have high proportions of Conservative voters. The readership of the three broadsheets are dominated by the ageing middle and upper classes (half the Telegraph’s readers are over sixty-five), while the readers of the Express (well known for its obsession with front-page stories on immigration and the weather) are from a lower social class.
Newspaper circulation is dwarfed, however, by online traffic and the huge reach of Internet news sites. The dominant force in this arena is the Daily Mail, whose Mail Online site had 100 million monthly browsers in January 2012. It is the world’s most popular news website. The Guardian is the second largest newspaper website in the UK, with 63 million monthly users.
For newspapers whose key agenda is to reflect readers’ anxiety over the breakdown of society, drugs are the perfect mechanism. The threat posed by a new drug, that smoking cannabis will lead to heroin addiction or the thought that drug dealers are stalking the streets with impunity, is designed to fill readers, especially the parents of teenagers, with dread.
And the villain of the piece does not always take the form of the evil drug dealer or smuggler: they can be the lax parent, the drug fiend who will do anything for a fix, the pro-legalisation liberal or the feeble government minister failing to act in the face of an impending threat to civil society. Many media outlets are well aware of their audience’s fears and are more than willing to turn the scare-factor dial to 10 when it comes to narcotics.
Take the Daily Mail for example. It is, as many journalists know, a newspaper which employs some of the best reporters in the business, with a reputation for thoroughness and fact checking. But when it comes to drugs, their high standards seem not to apply.
As the Mail’s long-standing editor Paul Dacre repeats whenever he’s asked, its success as one of Britain’s most popular and influential newspapers is based on understanding the wants and needs of its audience. Dacre logically presumes that many of his readers, as he possibly does himself, see the drug world and its impact not just as an immediate threat to their family, their valuables and their personal safety, but to the very fabric of society. This anxiety is repackaged back to his readers, in articles aimed to engender fear or moral outrage or both, on a near daily basis. Danny Kushlick387 of the drug-law reform pressure group Transform explains the dynamic through the ‘securitisation theory’, a term used in foreign-policy discussions to explain how states react with extraordinary measures when they perceive a threat to their existence. ‘In a securitised system, normal rules don’t apply,’ he says. ‘You don’t check value for money on wars, you don’t apply evidence-based templates to assess cost-benefit analysis. What you do is fight, and as in any war you require propaganda to sustain the fight.’
To the Daily Mail, stories about drugs not only sell papers, but ensure that policymakers will incur the wrath of nearly 2 million voters if they follow anything other than the newspaper’s hard-line stance on illegal drugs. A former Mail journalist, who did not want to be named, said drugs are one of a hit list of subjects given what she calls the ‘Daily Mail treatment’. ‘Stories are used to panic people. All Dacre knows is the Daily Mail, he has no proper perspective on the world.’
The public perception of how drug users and dealers behave has been drilled into Britain’s psyche for decades. It is coloured by a media industry which, since the days of American media mogul William Randolph Hearst, has revelled in tales of evil drug peddlers, spineless addicts and strange substances that literally have a life of their own.
‘All the lines of attack388 we still see today in the media were in place before 1914,’ says Harry Shapiro in his book on drugs and Hollywood, Shooting Stars. ‘The public wanted heroes and villains, they wanted scapegoats, people to blame for everything that went wrong in their lives, they wanted sex, depravity, mystery and murder. Hearst quickly realised that drug stories could provide the lot.
‘The game plan was to take some kernels of truth around the undeniable dangers of drugs – the addictive potential of morphine or the anxiety and paranoia of chronic cocaine use – and magnify them through a prism of racism, nativism and fear.’ One headline, ‘Negro cocaine fiends are a new southern menace’, based on the fact black slaves had been given cocaine to relieve fatigue while working on Southern plantations, sparked calls by local police for an upgrade in pistol power.
The tightening of alcohol licensing laws and the outlawing of opium and cocaine during World War One created the first underground drugs scene in Britain. It was largely based around the ‘theatre set’ in London’s Soho and featured a mix of famous actors and actresses, opium merchants and prostitutes. For the media, the mix of drugs, foreigners and stage stars was too appetising to ignore.
The deaths from drug overdoses of two famous stage stars, Billie Carleton in 1918 and Freda Kempton in 1922, caused outrage. On both occasions newspapers depicted the innocent damsels seduced to ruin by the evil drug peddlers. ‘There was already a moral panic389 associated with drugs, but Billie Carleton was seen as different, she was portrayed as this waif-like figure when she was nothing of the sort,’ says Marek Kohn in his book, Dope Girls.
Since then the dominant media message has primarily been that drug users are either mad, bad or sad. Roy Greenslade commented: ‘From the middle390 of the 1960s onwards it has been a roller-coaster ride, with the media “discovering” new evils at regular intervals, starting with cannabis and progressing through heroin, LSD, speed, cocaine, ecstasy and all manner of combinations and spin-offs.’
It is no coincidence that some of the biggest-hitting drug stories of the last two decades have revolved around iconic images of young women and drugs: Leah Betts lying dead in hospital surrounded by tubes as the innocent victim of ecstasy, the well brought-up Rachel Whitear, supplicant on the floor of a dingy flat with a needle in her hand; any model or celebrity corrupted by drugs.
In his book Drugs and Popular Culture,391 Paul Manning compared the reporting of deaths from ecstasy and heroin overdoses in the 2000s. He described the explosion in media coverage of ecstasy as being all about the ‘threat to the innocent’. While heroin addiction was portrayed as a problem of the underclass, and therefore a less pressing issue for the newspaper-reading public, ‘in the minds of journalists might it be that ecstasy is more newsworthy because it is understood as a threat to respectable middle-class families?’
This would explain why the media has paid more attention to deaths linked to ecstasy than other drugs. An analysis by the Information is Beautiful392 website, which specialises in presenting visualised statistics, found the media reported 100 per cent of deaths relating to ecstasy use, compared to only 9 per cent of heroin deaths and 2 per cent of deaths from alcohol poisoning. Meanwhile a review of ten years of Scottish drug-death reporting393 carried out by researchers at Glasgow University found that the likelihood of a newspaper reporting a death from paracetamol was only one in 250. For diazepam, it was one in fifty. For amphetamine, it was one in three. For ecstasy, a drug associated with teenagers from Middle England, every associated death was reported.
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When it comes to drugs, the ideology of a newspaper usurps its basic journalistic remit to convey the facts (objectively) to the public. Richard Peppiatt,394 the former Daily Star reporter who quit in protest at the newspaper’s alleged ‘anti-Muslim’ coverage, told the Leveson Inquiry: ‘If a scientist announces their research has found ecstasy to be safer than alcohol, I know my job as a tabloid reporter is to portray this man as a quack. If a judge passes down a community sentence to a controversial offender, I know my job is to make them appear out of touch. Positive peer reviews are ignored; sentencing guidelines are buried. The ideological imperative comes before the journalistic one – drugs are always bad, British justice is always soft.’
For newspapers eager to push forward a strong moral or political agenda, the drug issue provides an ideal grandstanding opportunity. This will influence the spin they put on drugs stories, the kind of stories they will and will not run, and any specific campaigns that are launched. Newspapers will leave room for opposing voices on their pages, and may veer away from their established line on occasions, but generally if an editor wants to get across the message that their publication is vociferously ‘anti-drugs’, then the readers, and the policymakers will know about it.
It is no coincidence that since the barrage of stories about the dangers of cannabis published in papers such as the Daily Mail throughout the 2000s, the public’s perception of the dangers of the drug has shifted. In 2001 nearly395 half those asked as part of the annual British Social Attitudes Survey carried out by the National Centre for Social Research said cannabis was not ‘as damaging as you think’. By 2010 this had fallen to 24 per cent.
There are few areas of public policy where the press has more power than on the issue of drugs. In its 2012 submission to the Leveson Inquiry, the UK Drug Policy Commission concluded that press reporting on drugs issues is ‘overwhelming the policy396 process’. The influence of the press is so great when it comes to drugs that policies have been generated from myths printed in newspapers whose primary concern is generating favourable headlines.
In the run-up to the 2005 general election, Labour floated a series of policies to make it clear that it was as tough as the Tories on drugs and crime. Cleverly, they linked fear of drugs with the need to protect children. Tony Blair wrote an article397 in the News of the World backing the paper’s campaign to drug-test schoolchildren and subject them to regular sniffer-dog searches. The paper had even gone so far as to fund a six-month drug-testing398 trial at a state school in Kent.
Secondly, and with much fanfare, the tastiest bone thrown to the press pack was an idea first mooted by William Hague and the Conservatives in 2000: a new US-style law to stem the ‘scourge’ of drug dealers preying on vulnerable schoolchildren. Anyone caught selling drugs within 500 metres of a school would be given a lengthier sentence.
The national tabloids promptly heralded a ‘PURGE ON PUSHERS AT THE SCHOOL GATE’399. One local newspaper editorial grimly warned: ‘Catch them young seems to be the motto of drug pushers, and all schools need to be aware that these suppliers of death are hanging around school gates looking for potential new customers.’ The campaign provided great publicity for Labour’s desperate need to appear tough on crime, but there was only one problem, and Labour knew it: the school-gate dealer is a chimera. While newspapers and politicians are keen to give the phenomenon airtime, drug squad officers will quietly explain that it never actually happens. It’s an urban myth inspired by the belief that people who sell drugs are motivated by a desire to corrupt innocent children rather than a need to make money.
Parliament would not be fooled so easily. When the ‘school-gate law’ was debated in the House of Commons, it was branded a ‘media stunt’ by the Labour MP for Bassetlaw, John Mann, adding to the scepticism surrounding his own party’s proposal. He told MPs that a detailed investigation of 200 complaints from constituents about drug dealing outside school gates found none was based on concrete evidence. When he put the issue to school pupils he said they ‘derided’ him. ‘The idea that dealers would wait at the school gate was laughed out of court. They asked me, “Why do you think we’d be stupid enough to buy or sell drugs by our school? If we want drugs, we know where to get them.”’
A parliamentary review could find no evidence before or since the law change that police, prosecutors or the courts have found, arrested or prosecuted anyone for selling drugs outside a school.
Amusingly, the only example of an adult dealer caught selling drugs outside school gates was a fake. In 2003 the People newspaper ran an article headlined ‘On sale at school400 gates … kiddie coke at 50p a go’, which described how a dealer was ‘cynically targeting youngsters’ with pills outside a London school. The story was accompanied by a photograph of ‘Rev’, the dealer, ‘a surly nineteen-year-old dressed in ripped jeans and a leather jacket, with short black spiky hair’. But it turned out ‘Rev’ was in fact the teenage son of the newspaper’s photographer. The scam was spotted by the boy’s mother, who promptly called up the People to complain. Journalist and photographer were sacked for gross misconduct, despite a defence in court that the paper ‘made up stories401 all the time’.
The media’s power to affect drug policy is undoubted, but are the changes good or bad for society? In the case of the school-gate drug-dealers law, which was largely based on newspaper fantasies, the answer is no. Since the law402 came into effect in January 2006, the courts are yet to convict a single dealer of pushing drugs outside the school gates. Instead the law is being used by West Yorkshire police force to ramp up sentences for dealers caught selling drugs to adults arrested in alleys or pubs that just happen to be up to 500 metres away from the nearest school. Not only has the law got police chasing shadows, it is being used against people it was not meant to target.
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There appeared to be a detectable, and somewhat mutually beneficial meeting of minds between prime minister-in-waiting Gordon Brown and Daily Mail editor Paul Dacre in the middle of 2007. Brown, gearing up to lead the Labour Party and take over from Tony Blair, was eager to ensure he had continued support from the influential mid-market tabloid. Dacre was eager to see a triumphant end to his personal, three-year mission to return cannabis to being a Class B drug.
David Blunkett had moved it to Class C in 2004 on the grounds that making cannabis possession a non-arrestable offence would reduce the number of otherwise law-abiding people being criminalised, reduce friction between the police and the wider community and allow police more time to spend investigating more serious crimes. But to Dacre and the Mail, the move was the thin end of a wedge that would turn Britain into a drug free-for-all.
Unlike in the Blair–Dacre relationship, both men respected each other. Dacre had already gone on the record as saying Brown was ‘touched by the mantle403 of greatness’. They shared the same highly moralistic outlooks and espoused the virtues of traditional family life, hard work and patriotism.
In the run-up to the Labour leadership battle in May 2007 Brown was declared in a Mail editorial as being ‘head and shoulders’404 above the other candidates. The paper ran affectionate pieces about Brown’s love for his family and his wife’s charming fashion sense. And within weeks of becoming prime minister, Brown announced his intention to reclassify cannabis to Class B, despite the fact that the ACMD had concluded only a year before that all the evidence showed the drug should remain at Class C.
Gordon Brown’s statement of intent was welcomed by the Daily Mail as a major victory for the paper. It quoted Whitehall sources saying the move was inspired by a ‘personal instinct of Mr Brown’,405 although many at the paper believed its own editor was the real inspiration. After the reclassification to Class B was announced in May 2008 – against the advice of yet another analysis of the dangers of cannabis by the ACMD – the Daily Mail rejoiced and said the PM’s ‘brave, justified’ decision406 showed ‘moral courage’.
What left the experts on the ACMD spinning was that the new prime minister justified his decision to ignore their carefully gathered scientific evidence by pointing out, on the GMTV sofa, that skunk was in fact ‘lethal’ to users. They couldn’t believe their ears – and the statistics were there to see – no one had ever died as a direct result of cannabis poisoning.
Few were more surprised than Dr Les King, formerly head of the Forensic Science Service’s (FSS) drugs intelligence unit, who had handed Brown a report into cannabis potency only days before the GMTV appearance. ‘To our surprise,407 Gordon Brown asked to see a copy of our conclusions,’ Dr King later told the media academic, former BBC home affairs correspondent and author Jon Silverman. ‘He clearly read it, but not long afterwards came out with the statement that skunk is lethal. We all laughed. It wasn’t supported by our research at all. I think the newspaper stories must have had an impact on policy.’
The cannabis reclassification debacle was a classic case of policies being carried out by a political and media elite without due reference to the popular will. A survey of public attitudes to cannabis carried out by Ipsos MORI in 2008408 showed that there is little support for Class B level penalties for cannabis possession. Of the survey’s 1,003 respondents, 41 per cent believed that two years’ imprisonment was an appropriate penalty for cannabis possession (equivalent to Class C), whereas 27 per cent of those polled believed that there should be no legal penalty whatsoever.
It is unlikely that cannabis would now be a Class B drug unless the media had exerted so much pressure on the government to amend its ‘mistake’, a claim backed by the government’s own Science and Technology Committee409 in its 2006 report, Drug Classification: Making a Hash of it. On the decision by Home Secretary Charles Clarke to review the classification of cannabis in 2005, it concluded: ‘The timing of the second review against a backdrop of intense media hype and so soon after the change in cannabis classification had come into effect gave the impression that a media outcry was sufficient to trigger a review.’
But it is equally unlikely that it would have become a Class C drug in the first place, had it not been for the media’s reasonable reaction to the Runciman Report’s recommendation in 2000 to downgrade cannabis. Yet by the time the politicians had come round to the idea and set the wheels in motion for a change in the law, the media had turned. Commander Brian Paddick, who oversaw the Brixton Experiment, whereby police were directed to tackle heroin and crack above cannabis, was hounded out of his job, and the government was pilloried for being soft on drugs. As a result, the law was watered down so much as to become no different from what it had been before, and therefore no one was any the wiser as to whether the initial aims of downgrading cannabis would have been achieved. The experiment was wrecked before it had even begun.
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In studying the media influence on government drug policy, Jon Silverman discovered that examples of the media’s fingerprints were everywhere. He concluded: ‘There is no field410 of public affairs which reflects the media influence more vividly than that of drugs and that, especially over the past decade, a small number of newspaper editors have acted as a policy “satnav”, which ministers have followed almost slavishly in their desire to send “messages”, with the outcome that drug classification has become ludicrously detached from drug harm.’
In a debate on the phone-hacking scandal in the House of Commons in July 2011, the Liberal Democrat MP Tom Brake used the opportunity to make a point about the media’s influence on policies such as drugs: ‘Does the prime minister believe that once a healthier relationship is established between politicians and the media, it will be easier for governments to adopt evidence-based policy in relation to, for instance, tackling drugs, community sentences, or immigration and asylum?’
To which David Cameron replied: ‘That is a lovely idea. As I say, the inquiry will not mean no contact between politicians and the media. There are difficult issues – the Hon. Gentleman mentioned a couple of them – where we need to try and explain and take people with us when we are making difficult decisions. We cannot do that ourselves through direct communications. We need a lively and questioning media to help us do that, but perhaps a healthy relationship will make what he wants more possible.’
Rather than solving the problems of the drug trade, the media’s approach merely locks the debate in the Victorian era, with little acknowledgement of the deep-seated problems behind the drug trade’s impact. In simplifying the issues, boiling them down and appealing to the lowest common denominator, newspapers are stalling progress.
As the Royal Society of Arts Commission noted in its well-respected report, Drugs: Facing the Facts, in 2007: ‘Much of the411 current debate about illegal drugs, especially in Parliament and the press, strikes us as positively medieval, with drug users demonised as though at the beginning of the twenty-first century we were still in the business of casting out demons and burning witches. As one of this commission’s members put it, “it’s time to get real”.’
The same could be said of the broadcast media. While some intelligent documentaries and TV series have been commissioned, most TV programmes tend to enforce stereotypes and myths rather than address them. In the fly-on-the-wall police show Coppers, well-known local drug addicts routinely have their often pitiful-looking existences interrupted by what looks suspiciously like human-rights abuse dressed up as a drug raid. As the cameras follow police officers around decrepit council homes, typically to unearth a few measly rocks of crack gaffer-taped inside a cistern, the addict is treated like a subhuman before the camera crew departs, stepping over the now trashed front door.
In the age of Ofcom, programme makers are under pressure to make sure controversial storylines, such as those about drugs, are as realistic as possible. But sometimes this doesn’t quite pan out. In 2008, for example, the soap opera Hollyoaks412 featured a dramatic story charting the descent of a model school pupil, from her first cannabis joint into heroin addiction – all in the space of only four weeks. Conversely, some TV shows seek to soothe their audiences, with footage of the drug war being won by plucky officers cleverly busting the sneaky bad guys, such as Border Control and Police Interceptors.
Channel 4 announced it had hit ‘TV gold’ in 2012 with a programme format that was to revitalise their ‘mischievous’ reputation: Drugs Live would feature volunteers who would consume a range of illicit intoxicants and then be filmed in order to show viewers the effects. It would put to the test the claims of the former drugs adviser Professor David Nutt that the effects of ecstasy were less damaging than alcohol. Critics lined up to claim the show was sensationalism wrapped in an educational format, and that it would only further the normalisation of drugs among viewers. Channel 4 hit back saying it was a ‘radical’ new science series which would add to the ‘social policy’ debate around the harmful effects of drugs.
As the journalism industry continues to allow reporters less time and space to seek out the truth amid ever increasing demands for content, the standards of reporting can only get worse and the need to pander to the reader and seek out scapegoats heightened. Drug addicts or those who speak out in favour of being ‘soft on drugs’ have come under a barrage of visceral attacks from columnists. At times it is difficult to spot where opinion slips into incitement.
A 2011 column in the Irish Independent, headlined ‘STERILISING JUNKIES413: MAY SEEM HARSH BUT IT DOES MAKE SENSE’, commented favourably on a suggestion that drug users should be offered money to be sterilised. The journalist Ian O’Doherty went on to describe a group of drug users as ‘feral, worthless scumbags’ and said ‘if every junkie in this country were to die tomorrow, I would cheer’.
In a world where the consumer is king, it’s too simple just to blame newspapers. The public has a choice, and to a large extent it chooses to buy the Daily Mail and the Sun. The Mail is perhaps the last bastion of Middle England – and it plays a more active role in the debate on drugs than any other paper, with leading columnists drawing a line in the sand over drugs and accusing successive governments of inaction.
Its commitment to maintaining the war on drugs is based on the traditional morality of the middle classes, and the belief that a drug-free Britain is not only preferable but achievable, as if the wheels of demographic change, social mores and the Internet can be reversed. It is a powerful lobby, representing professional classes who work, pay taxes and, most importantly for any politician, vote. In short, once mobilised by stirring headlines, Middle England can still decide elections – something of which Gordon Brown was only too aware.
But the press’s grip on government policy, if not loosened by Leveson, is being challenged online where the news is largely free and opinion diverse. The next generation is becoming less reliant on newspapers for information on drugs. Teenagers are increasingly getting information over the Internet on specialist forums and social networking sites. As the writer Nic Fleming points out in an article in which he discusses the findings of the drug researcher Dr Fiona Measham: ‘Some of the more ridiculous newspaper stories414 about mephedrone were being debunked and mocked on Twitter within hours of publication. Whereas once sensationalist and inaccurate reporting in mainstream newspapers and television would have gone largely unchallenged, the Internet is slowly starting to undermine ill-informed, knee-jerk media and policy responses, potentially giving those with alternative and better-informed perspectives a louder voice, if people choose to listen.’
If Twitter were to establish itself by defining the outcome of the next British election, then perhaps the ideology of the press as a tool to be a ‘sanction of public opinion’ might be jolted into the twenty-first century. Until that point, the debate between the press, the public and politicians over drugs will remain firmly confined within parameters defined in the mists of time.