Prince, politics, and doctors: A year in the news framing of a drug epidemic

ABSTRACT

The death of a celebrity. Political platforms aimed at ending a scourge. A medical scandal. All of these events took place in 2016 with opioids as a common thread. Using a qualitative content analysis with articles from The New York Times and Wall Street Journal, we studied the trajectory of how opioids were framed before and after Prince’s death, during the final stretch of the 2016 political campaigns, and at the beginning of a scandal that linked the prescriptions of opioids to a pharmaceutical company. During much of this coverage, users, including Prince, were blamed for fatalities from opioids, though this began to change as doctors and pharmaceutical companies were tied to problems often embedded in economic incentives.

KEYWORDS:

• Opioids
• Medicalization
• Issue cultures
• Prince

Highlights

• A toxicology report published on 3 June 2016 stated that opioids had been found in Prince’s system.

• The lifespan of the cultural issue cycle for Prince’s death due to opioids was short-lived, while the cultural cycle for opioids maintains prominence into the 2016 election cycle.

• Blame for opioid overdoses tends to be placed on users at the time of Prince’s death. Doctors and pharmaceuticals were rarely blamed until the end of 2016.

Notes

¹ We are grateful for those who read earlier versions of this manuscript and noted these out-of-frame behaviors (Goffman, 1974).

² We agree with an earlier reader that this is an important aspect of why someone might be using opioids. Someone like Prince who is dealing with chronic pain would likely not view their use of opioids as abusive, but required in order to stay alive and productive. This does not, however, deflect from the fact that reports placed blame for an overdose on some entity regardless of whether an opioid is used to treat chronic or acute pain or an otherwise healthy individual is trying to achieve a high.

³ This article mentions Prince’s hip surgery, which some sources argue would not have been possible given his Jehovah’s Witness faith. This article states that a posthumous examination of Prince’s body found a scar on his hip consistent with hip surgery, though no account is made as to whether the surgery, if one occurred, happened before or after his conversion.