Sending a message: Ecstasy, equasy and the media politics of drug classification

Abstract

In February 2009, the UK government's Advisory Council on the Misuse of Drugs (ACMD) published a review of MDMA (ecstasy) which recommended a reclassification from the highest class A to the ‘intermediate category’ class B, on the basis of a review of recent scientific research. This became a matter of news attention alongside a recent journal article by Professor David Nutt, the chairman of the ACMD, in which ecstasy consumption was suggested to be no more dangerous than horse-riding. The home secretary Jacqui Smith rejected the recommendations and Professor Nutt was forced to apologise for making the comparison. Some sections of the media coverage around this topic contrasted the (implicitly irrational) political response to the review with the authority of the scientific evidence it represented, while other media accounts characterised Nutt either as an ‘out of touch’, or ‘immoral’ academic or as having a politically motivated social agenda. In this way, risk issues are played out in, and through, media discourses of science and political authority. This paper analyses the national newspaper coverage of the debate around the risks of ecstasy use and drug classification in the context of the political imperatives within media accounts, and identifies the key discursive strategies employed by those engaged in the media debate. The paper briefly discusses the relevance of a number of risk theories before focusing on the governmentality approach to risk in order to explain how, despite the conservatism inherent in recent drug policy, the neo-liberal managerialism evident in recent UK governmental discourses largely sets the agenda in the media coverage.

Keywords:

• risk
• governmentality
• drugs
• ecstasy
• politics

Notes

1. Gordon notes that Foucault's original lectures discussing governmentality were followed by a review of neo-liberalism in ‘three post-war Western countries: West Germany, the United States and France’ (1991, p. 41).

2. Evan Harris is a qualified medical doctor, and the Liberal Democrat science spokesman. As an honorary associate of the National Secular Society (evanharris.org.uk), he often adopts a rational scientific perspective on political and ethical issues.

3. The use of this term in itself works rhetorically to diminish the credibility of the moral position.

4. The NDPA is a pressure group which campaigns against drug use, and more specifically against ‘harm reduction’ strategies which they consider to be ‘covert propaganda for drug libertarianism’ (NDPA 2009).

5. It might be argued that in his apparent acceptance of the legal framework of statutory regulation and punishment exemplified in the three stage classification system, Nutt's position is largely in keeping with the conservative perspective on drug policy. However, I would argue that the direction of his discursive approach, and the way in which it is framed (as a technical, amoral rationality) locates it firmly within the neo-liberal agenda outlined by O'Malley (1999, 2001).