Meth Wars

How the War on Drugs is maintained through racism,authority and public opinion.

From the hit television series Breaking Bad, to daily news reports, anti-drug advertising campaigns and highly publicized world-wide hunts for “narcoterrorists” such as Joaquin “El Chapo” Guzman, the drug, methamphetamine occupies a unique and important space in the public’s imagination. In Meth Wars, Travis Linnemann situates the "meth epidemic" within the broader culture and politics of drug control and mass incarceration.

Linnemann draws together a range of examples and critical interdisciplinary scholarship to show how methamphetamine, and the drug war more generally, are part of a larger governing strategy that animates the politics of fear and insecurity and links seemingly unrelated concerns such as environmental dangers, the politics of immigration and national security, policing tactics, and terrorism. The author’s unique analysis presents a compelling case for how the supposed “meth epidemic” allows politicians, small town police and government counter-narcotics agents to engage in a singular policing project in service to the broader economic and geostrategic interests of the United States.

Travis Linnemann is Associate Professor of Sociology, Kansas State University. Among other works, he is the author of our Meth Wars: Police, Media, Power and coauthor of Media and Crime in the US (Sage) and coeditor of our Ghost Criminology: The Afterlife of Crime and Punishment, and he is coeditor-in-chief of Crime, Media, Culture.

Jennifer Carlson,Assistant Professor of Sociology, University of Arizona:
Contributing to scholarly debates about the political and cultural intersections of drugs, rurality, and whiteness, Meth Wars shows how meth impacts not just individuals and institutions but also imaginations. Ultimately, this is a book about challenging the reader to think beyond the widespread justifications for sustaining the war on drugs and the popularized arguments for ending it. Questioning both leftwing and rightwing sensibilities on drugs, Linnemann provokes the reader into imagining a different worldone beyond the meth imaginary.

Linnemanns book is a key text for understanding how moral panics about an infernal substance, and its diabolical seller, both stem from and further entrench the manifold contradictions of late capitalist society.

Michelle Brown,author of The Culture of Punishment:
A scholarly page-turner, Meth Wars takes us on a journey through the cultural imaginary surrounding drug crime, policing, and punishment in the most thorough and illuminating way to date. Poetic, critical, and rigorous, Travis Linnemann frames how we 'see' meth and how our views lead others to 'see' meth as well through the power of misplaced drug war rhetoric. This study of whiteness, class, and privilege in drug imagery and drug wars is a profound contribution.

Dawn Paley,author of Drug War Capitalism:
Meth Wars interrupts official discourse on drug use in America, drawing out the relationship between methamphetamine and the politics of fear. Linnemann invites us into the methamphetamine imaginary, deftly detailing how racism, the drug war and capitalism are manifested and maintained through pop culture, policing and state power. A compelling resource on a critical subject.