Mediated addiction: The drug discourses of Hong Kong youth

Abstract

This paper examines the ways young people in Hong Kong at different stages of involvement with illegal drugs respond to government produced anti-drug television commercials through a methodology which provided them with the technical skills and equipment to make their own short videos about drugs. An analysis of the videos they produced and their interaction while producing them reveals that participants with different drug-taking experiences have very different and often multiple ways of talking about drugs, and that these different ‘discourses’ and the ways they are deployed in different contexts affect how ‘at-risk’ they are for new or continued drug use and how they respond to anti-drug messages designed to mitigate this risk.

Keywords:

• Discourse analysis
• drug abuse
• youth

Acknowledgements

This research was made possible by grant # 257102 from the Health Care and Promotion Fund (Hong Kong). I would like to thank my colleague, Dr. Angel Lin, and my research assistant, Ms. Wendy Tsang.

Notes

¹Excerpts are translated from the Cantonese.