Risk narratives and drug scare: local media’s coverage of crack use in Paris’s open drug scenes
Résumé
This paper focuses on the narratives of risk constructed and conveyed by the
local media about crack use, abuse and addiction in Paris’s open drug scenes. We
first trace media coverage and some of its core claims about the destructiveness
of this smoked cocaine freebase — chemically responsible for mendacity, prostitution, violence and all kinds of social problems geographically concentrated in
areas like Stalingrade and La Collina, “the gate of hell” in the northeast of the city.
Based in a frenzy approach to public health and public order, distant to scientific
analysis and data evidence, these media’s narratives on risk justify a large social
panic and a local drug scare construction, misinforming population and presenting
crack abuse and addiction not as symptoms of social disaffiliation problematic,
but as its most important causes. With regard to it, we maintain that the local media narratives provide both a hysterical speech against historically marginalized
social groups and a large propaganda to justify ostensive and urgent sanitary and
police intervention against them. We analyze, in this context, how the mobilization of these narratives forges public opinion and impacts the institutionalization
of the crack question in public agenda, influencing morally state discourses and
practices concerning users, dealers and the urban territory of Paris