The Social Value of Drug Addicts

Uses of the Useless

Merrill Singer, J Bryan Page

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781315417158
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Anthropology
• Index: Social Sciences

Drug users are typically portrayed as worthless slackers, burdens on society, and just plain useless—culturally, morally, and economically. By contrast, this book argues that the social construction of some people as useless is in fact extremely useful to other people. Leading medical anthropologists Merrill Singer and J. Bryan Page analyze media representations, drug policy, and underlying social structures to show what industries and social sectors benefit from the criminalization, demonization, and even popular glamorization of addicts. Synthesizing a broad range of key literature and advancing innovative arguments about the social construction of drug users and their role in contemporary society, this book is an important contribution to public health, medical anthropology, popular culture, and related fields.

CHAPTER ONE

Drugs, Race, and Gender in the Social Construction of Drug Consumers

Recognizing the Origins of Othering

When human behavior involves the illicit ingestion of mind-altering drugs, the discourse about that behavior tends to accrue layers of social judgment, prejudice, stereotyping, and fear. This Othering process is hardly unexpected, given the personal experience that many people can claim as a result of having direct contact with drug-impaired people, but how much of it is “real” (i.e., in the sense of being empirically verifiable) and how much is constructed (i.e., based on culturally learned and socially motivated attitudes and beliefs)? Race, socioeconomic status, and gender constitute principal components of how people in the contemporary world perceive any complex of behaviors, and drug use is no exception. Basic prejudice against drug use and drug users tends to push perceptions in the direction of pejorative terms and discriminatory behavior.

These perceptions often rationalize and exacerbate racial and socioeconomic blame or gender prejudice. For example, the “typical” heroin user in some cities may be conceptualized as African American and may have traits attributed to him/her that correspond to racial stereotypes, such as unwillingness to work, irresponsibility, being given to larceny, and being dedicated to hedonistic pursuits. Although the literature lacks any definitive empirical data on the precise characteristics of the population of heroin users for the United States, the data contain sufficient basis to say that none of these stereotypes is true nationwide. White males dominate the population of heroin users, and some portion of this population, both African American and white, have regular jobs and families. The same applies to drug users of other ethnic identities as well. Along the lines of gender, in part females stand accused of heavy use of anti-anxiety medication (e.g., “mother’s little helpers” as enshrined in the lyrics of a classic Rolling Stones song), stereotypically characterized as over-stressed housewives, desperate to keep all the plates of life spinning at once, worrying about their children and their future, and trying to please demanding and unappreciative husbands. The research data actually show, however, that relatively few women take minor tranquilizers regularly, and that their potential for addiction, although present, is not great. Nevertheless, stereotypes like this exist—in fact much harsher ones abound—and are perpetuated in the public imaginary.

What are the origins of these pejorative conceptualizations? Are they totally false, or do they contain a grain of truth? How do we go about discerning the difference between unwarranted assumptions about drug users and their “true nature?” Why do these harshly judgmental configurations populate media messages, inform (or misinform) public policy, and adversely impact the lives of many people? This chapter addresses these questions, while dismantling the highly complex and troubling (if socially useful) set of images that surround drug using behavior and characterize drug users as devalued people. Specifically, the chapter examines the social and media construction of the poor as an unworthy group of people in society, including exploration of the politically useful concepts of the “welfare queen” and “welfare cheaters” as tropes for people of color in efforts to gut welfare programs. Embedded in the perspectives that drive such efforts, the chapter argues, is the belief that many if not most welfare recipients use their benefits to buy drugs and get high. This linkage of poverty and drug abuse in contemporary thinking about people of color, has helped to promote the incarceral and anti-community policies of the War on Drugs, the multi-generation reproduction of an unequal opportunity structure, and the single-minded and simple-minded demonizing of illicit drug use (Reignarman and Levine 1997).

THE MAKING OF THE UNDESERVING POOR

During the 2012 presidential race, Republican candidate Mitt Romney gave a now infamous talk at a May 17 fundraiser in Boca Raton, Florida. Now known as the 47% speech (MoJo News Team 2012), Romney asserted the following:

There are 47 percent of the people who will vote for the president no matter what. All right, there are 47 percent who are with him, who are dependent upon government, who believe that they are victims, who believe that government has a responsibility to care for them, who believe that they are entitled to health care, to food, to housing, to you name it. That that’s an entitlement. And the government should give it to them. And they will vote for this president no matter what…. These are people who pay no income tax.

Reflected in this speech is a view of the poor, including poor working people, held by economic elites within society, a view that is disseminated to the society as whole through various communication media. This is the view that there are many undeserving poor, people who are a weight on society rather than contributors to it; moreover, they are said to rob society to the degree that they received any government-supported health or social program benefits. This view, as Navarro (1986:2) points out, is historically rooted in an “active ideological offensive [designed to] create a new consensus around a new set of values, beliefs and practices” regarding the poor. This perspective sees the poor as a form of dependent, defective, and delinquent social parasite.

Exemplary of this attitude is the pejorative term “welfare queen” which was introduced into the English language in 1976, primarily by Ronald Reagan. In his political speeches, Reagan built an image of poor people who feel entitled to the benefit of other people’s hard work. He illustrated this claim using a newspaper report about a Chicago woman named Linda Taylor who was convicted of using various aliases and of cheating the government using false welfare applications. A parallel case even older than Taylor’s is the so-called “lady in mink,” as she was known after New York newspapers in 1947 printed several articles about a woman wearing a mink stole who showed up at a welfare office to pick up a check. Eventually, in this case, the New Yorker’s press critic A. J. Liebling (1947) revealed that despite having collected a large divorce settlement a number of years earlier, the woman and her 5-year old daughter were now dependent on $5.40 a day from the New York City welfare department. Moreover, the seemingly stylish mink was, in fact, old and deteriorating and of little real monetary value. This type of mischaracterization, as we will show, is the norm in this entire genre of attack narrative.

Being an accomplished storyteller (his nickname was the “Great Communicator”), and given to using stereotypes about the poor, on the campaign trail Reagan embellished the details of Linda Taylor’s case, without actually using her name, to create a fictive individual whom he presented as both real and as representative of the undeserving, socially useless poor. Said Reagan (New York Times 1976) of a woman in Chicago:

She has eighty names, thirty addresses, twelve Social Security cards and is collecting veteran’s benefits on four non-existing deceased husbands. And she is collecting Social Security on her cards. She’s got Medicaid, getting food stamps, and she is collecting welfare under each of her names. Her tax-free cash income is over $150,000.

All of this imagery was built on a relative minor case of welfare fraud involving about $8,000. In their book, “The Mommy Myth,” Susan Douglas, a professor of communication studies at the University of Michigan, and Meredith Michaels, of the Department of Philosophy at Smith College (2004:185), pointed out the nature of Reagan’s innovative stereotyping:

He specialized in the exaggerated, outrageous tale that was almost always unsubstantiated, usually false, yet so sensational that it merited repeated recounting…. And because his “examples” of welfare queens drew on existing stereotypes of welfare cheats and resonated with news stories about welfare fraud, they did indeed gain real traction.

Thus, despite the fact that very few cases of individuals engaged in significant welfare fraud have been arrested or tried, as Douglas and Michaels (2004) report, polls from the period show that Americans, in part because of sensationalized welfare cheat language and frequent stories about welfare fraud in the media, vastly overestimated the actual incidence of welfare fraud (which pales by comparison with the level of white-collar fraud committed by wealthy individuals). Some polls found that respondents believed that 40 percent of those on welfare were cheaters although the Department of Health and Human Services estimated at the time that less than 4 percent of individuals receiving welfare actually lied about their financial situation on their applications.

In fact, even during Reagan’s presidency the stereotype of the welfare queen was a straw dog. Having more children did not mean receiving more welfare assistance. The actual average welfare increase for having a child was about $60 per month. In some states, women with a newborn did not qualify for any additional aid after her second child was born. In other states, only a small increase was allowed. Having more children simply to get more welfare money would have been a form a self-destructive economics.

Still the stereotype caught hold and many others contributed to and enhanced making this falsehood one of the hardiest chestnuts of contemporary political discourse. In the words of David Zucchino, a Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter, and author of The Myth of the Welfare Queen (1999), the notion of the welfare queen is “thoroughly embedded in American folklore.”

Adds Kaaryn Gustason (2012), author of “Cheating Welfare: Public Assistance and the Criminalization of Poverty,” “It’s one of those persistent symbols that come up every election cycle.”

For example, Mississippi Governor Haley Barbour, who worked for Reagan as director of the White House Office of Political Affairs in 1985–1986, maintained (Kessler 2011) that there was a need to increase co-payments for Medicaid because: “We have people pull up at the pharmacy window in a BMW and say they can’t afford their co-payment.” Mississippi, in fact, provides one of the lowest levels of Medicaid benefits to working adults in the country. For unemployed parents to qualify, their yearly family income must be less than 24 percent of the poverty level. Working parents can qualify only if they make no more than 44 percent of the federal poverty line. Pregnant women are eligible with income up to 185 percent of the poverty level. This means that a working couple in Mississippi with one child may earn no more than $8,150 a year to qualify for Medicaid, and seniors or pregnant women can earn no more than $20,000 a year. At these levels, people in Mississippi receiving Medicaid who drive a BMW are likely to be very rare, of the sort that birdwatchers call a “mega,” one you may never see in your lifetime. Indeed, it is not unreasonable that a family of three earning less than $8,150 annually would have trouble having money for a co-pay, or for much else for that matter. Washington Post fact checker Glenn Kessler (2011) concludes:

Given that you have to be rather poor to get on Medicaid in Mississippi, it seems highly unlikely the state has many Medicaid recipients driving around BMWs, even used ones. Note that Barbour said “we have people”—suggesting this is not a rare event. The failure of Barbour’s aides to provide any documentation for this claim is rather suspicious.

Similarly, during the 2012 presidential race, candidate Rick Santorum, while campaigning in Iowa, said “I don’t want to make black people’s lives better by giving them somebody else’s money,” although he later claimed he did not mean to say “black people.” During the same campaign, Mitt Romney repeatedly asserted that his opponent, President Obama, wanted to transform America into an “entitlement society.” Another candidate, Newt Gingrich, called Obama a food-stamp president, while questioning poor children’s work ethic, and saying that poor people should want paychecks, not handouts (Blake 2012). Calling child labor laws “truly stupid,” Gingrich told an Iowa audience during the 2012 presidential campaign that children in poor neighborhoods have “no habits of working” nor getting paid for their endeavors “unless it’s illegal.” Such children, he maintained should be allowed to work as janitors in their schools to earn money and develop a connection to the school (Huisenga 2011).

Franklin Gilliam (1999) of the University of California, Los Angeles became interested in the welfare queen narrative and initiated an interesting study to unravel its effects. An assumption he made in developing the study was that the idea of the welfare queen had gained the status of common knowledge, or what is known in social psychology as a “narrative script.” Such scripts distill information and concentrate it in catchwords allowing for the rapid communication of more complex ideas. The welfare queen script Gilliam found consisted of two key components: welfare recipients are disproportionately women (although the largest single group “on welfare” is actually children), and women on welfare are disproportionately African American (even though African Americans comprise only about one tenth of the total number of welfare recipients). In the study, participants watched one of four television stories about the impact of welfare reform on a woman the researchers named Rhonda Germaine. In the story Rhonda worries about the impact of the new welfare laws on her ability to care for her children. A still picture of Rhonda appears at two points in the story; each time it appears, it remains on the screen for about five seconds. Viewers were randomly assigned to one of four groups. Group one watched the news story with Rhonda cast as a white woman. Group two viewed the same story with Rhonda depicted as an African American woman. Group three watched the welfare story without seeing any visual representation of Rhonda. The last group was a control group that did not watch any TV news broadcast about welfare. The researchers inserted a new story about welfare into the middle position of their telecast following the first commercial break. They described the segment as having been selected at random from a news program broadcast during the past week. They found that among white study participants exposure to these script elements reduced their support for welfare programs, increased stereotyping of African Americans, and heightened support for maintaining traditional, unequal gender roles.

Research like this suggests that the media are important, if subtle, sources of popular stereotypes about people on welfare. One extensive content analysis of stories about welfare in news magazines and on network television carried out by Princeton political scientist Martin Gilens (1999) for the 1960s through 1992 found the following:

• Sixty-two percent of stories about poverty that appeared in TIME, Newsweek, and U.S. News and World Report featured African-Americans

• Sixty-five percent of network television news stories about welfare focused on African-Americans

• Fewer African-Americans are portrayed in “sympathetic” stories about poverty and welfare than whites

• News magazines suggest that almost 100 percent of the American underclass as African-Americans.

Based on his analysis, Gilens concluded that negative feelings about welfare among white Americans are rooted in the perception that welfare is a program for African Americans, which in turn, stems from the misrepresentation in the media that most welfare recipients are African Americans and the undeserving poor. Notably, Gilens analysis found that reports in the media about deserving poor focus on the elderly and the working poor who typically are portrayed as poor white individuals whereas poor blacks generally appear in stories about welfare abuse or the perennial underclass.

In the social environment created by such depictions of the ethnic minorities, the poor and welfare, and after what David Rozen (2007:40) has dubbed “a national discourse of extreme vitriol and hyperbole directed at all single, poor mothers, but with a coded sub-text denoting African-American and Latino women,” a new law was passed called the Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act (PRWORA). Women no longer were allowed to stay on welfare indefinitely. Additionally, Aid to Families with Dependent Children (AFDC), the needs-based welfare support th...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Introduction
• Chapter One Drugs, Race, and Gender in the Social Construction of Drug Consumers: Recognizing the Origins of Othering
• Chapter Two Drug Users through the Ages: When Did We Decide Addicts Were a Separate Category?
• Chapter Three Representations of Addicts and the Construction of Prohibitions
• Chapter Four Imagine That: Drug Users and Literature
• Chapter Five Picture This: Pictorial Construction of Drug Users in the World of Film
• Chapter Six The Legal Construction of Drug Users: Policy, the Courts, Incarcerating Institutions, Police Practice, and the War on Drugs
• Chapter Seven Drug Users in Social Science: The Others We’ve Made
• Conclusion From the Making and Using of the Useless to Social Integration
• References
• Index
• About the Authors