There’s no glamour in glue: News and the symbolic framing of substance misuse

Abstract

The symbolism of substance misuse is a familiar theme. However, relatively little attention has been paid specifically to the nature of the symbolic frameworks through which substance misuse is represented and even less attention to the part played by the news media in the reproduction of these symbolic frameworks. This article takes volatile substance abuse (VSA) and ecstasy as examples through which to explore the ways in which news production processes, together with the symbolic and inferential frameworks employed by journalists, intersect with structures of disadvantage, to reproduce particular news discourses or ways of understanding substance misuse. It suggests that VSA receives very little attention in the United Kingdom national press in comparison to ‘spectacular’, or ‘glamorous’ drugs such as ecstasy, despite the evidence available that VSA represents a problem of, at least, equivalent magnitude, if recorded associated annual deaths are taken as the measures of ‘seriousness’. It is suggested that significantly different symbolic frameworks are deployed in national newspapers to represent the ‘problems’ associated with VSA and ecstasy, and that these differences are explicable in terms of the cultural assumptions and inferential frameworks underpinning news production, together with news source activity, and the marketing strategies of newspapers in an era of intensified news commodification.