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ABSTRACT
Historically, the news media has been a primary participant in the construction of moral panics surrounding various drugs and their users. The current study utilizes the moral panic framework to depict how the media represents a drug new to the Western world: kratom. Kratom, a traditional plant-based substance from South Asia, came in to the public’s view when the DEA announced its intent to emergency schedule the substance, citing a threat to public health. We use content analysis to explore how kratom and kratom use is depicted in a sample of news media articles gathered from an online source. Broadly, we find that the news media seems to report more information about the substance and less hyperbole than is typical of media reports on drugs in the past.
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Notes on contributors
Megan Webb
Megan Webb is a graduate student in the Department of Sociology at the University of California, Riverside. Her areas of research interest include criminal justice policy, drug use and stigma, drug use and identity, and criminal decision making.
O. Hayden Griffin
O. O. Hayden Griffin, III is an associate professor in the Department of Criminal Justice at the University of Alabama at Birmingham. His research interests are drug policy, corrections, and law & society. His research has been published in Journal of Research in Crime and Delinquency, Criminal Justice and Behavior, and International Journal of Drug Policy.