Chapter 5. Russian Media Narratives About Young Drug Users

Abstract

Since the 1960s, the media in Western Europe and the United States has been one important actor in the public understanding of the drug phenomenon. In Russia, however, it is only since the 1980s that illegal drugs have been discussed in the media and this discussion remains on-going today. By using narrative analysis, this article focuses on how illegal drug use among young people is constructed in the Russian press. As a result of the narrative analysis, three main discourses were identified: a foreign problem discourse, a disease discourse, and a medical discourse.

Keywords :

• Russia
• public narratives
• Russian media
• claims-makers
• moral panic

THE AUTHORS

My Lilja, Ph.D., in criminology and is a senior lecturer at the Department of Social Work, and psychology at the University of Gävle, Sweden. Her main research interest is analyzing drug discourses. Her doctoral dissertation (2007) was about “Drug Discourses in Contemporary Russia” (Stockholm University, Department of Criminology) and considering a social construc- tivist perspective and discourse analysis. Her research areas are focused on criminology and social work areas focusing on both personal and situational or contextual variables. E-mail: [email protected]

Notes

2 Articles from the following newspapers were included: ArgumentyiFakty (AIF), Izvestiya, Literaturnaya Gazeta (LG), Nezavisimaya Gazeta (NG), Sovetskaya Rossiya (SR), Rossiiskaiya Gazeta (RG), Zavtra (Za), and Moskovskii komsolets (MK). The articles between 1997 and 2007 were collected from the East View Database (http://www.eastview.com) which contains publications from Russia and the Newly Independent States. Articles from year 2008 were collected from the different newspapers’ Internet sites.

3 The definition of youth is here regarded as a social construction (Jewkes, 2004). In this study, there has been an emphasis on how youth is described by the Russian press, e.g., “young people,” “children,” “students.”

4 It is here worth mentioning that increasingly research discuss the cause and effect relation idea in the stepping stone idea, e.g., Anthony (2012).

5 According to Cohen (2002, p. xiii), “moral panics about psychoactive drugs have been remarkable consistent for something like a hundred years.” In the concept of moral panic, there are some central elements (Cohen, 2002, p. xxii): (a) concern about a potential or imagined threat, (b) hostility towards the folk enemies who embody the problem and the agencies who are seen as responsible, (c) consensus that the threat exists, is serious and that “something should be done,” (d) disproportionality which means an exaggeration of the number of the cases, and (e) volatility which means that the panic erupts and dissipates suddenly.

6 Nils Bejerot was a doctor working in Stockholm and conducted a study about the relationship between drug use and drug policy in Stockholm in 1965–1970 (Boekhout van Solinge, 1997). He played a central role in the origin of the Swedish restrictive drug policy (ibid).

7 Since the mid-1970s, drug and alcohol user treatment services are conducted as a special form of treatment named “narcology” (Fleming, 1996). Doctors working in narcological centers come from either psychiatry or other branches of medicine (Green et al., 2000). Drug user treatment tends to be medically oriented. However, sometimes alternative treatments also are used, e.g., acupuncture, mild electric currents, machines producing positive ions, high colonic washouts using herbal infusions, and salt saunas (ibid.).

8 In 2002, a special Federal antidrug agency was created, the Federal Drug Control Service of the Russian Federation (FDCS). In 2005, about 35,000 people were employed in that drug agency (Putin meeting with the Director of the Federal Drugs Control Service, Viktor Cherkesov, 2005-12-02), which an indication of the priorities given to this body by the Russian government. Some of the goals of the FDCS regarding illicit drugs are, according to their homepage, for example, to combat illicit drug trafficking, to investigate crimes and carry out administrative proceedings referred by the legislation, to coordinate activities of federal executive bodies, to participate in the development and implementation of the state policy, to establish and maintenance a databank, and to interact and inform exchange with international organizations (http://fskn.gov.ru/, read 2013–01–13).

9 According to MacCoun and Reuter (2001), prohibitionists defend strict legal sanctions against all the currently illegal drugs. Decriminalizers could maintain the legal ban on sales but advocate a reduction of criminal sanctions for small amounts. Legalizers would like to make both sale and use of some illegal drugs legal but most advocate government regulation.