Book review: T Linnemann, Meth Wars: Police, Media, Power
| Author | Tammy Ayres |
| Published date | 01 February 2018 |
| Date | 01 February 2018 |
| DOI | http://doi.org/10.1177/1362480617743882 |
| Subject Matter | Book reviews |
743882TCR0010.1177/1362480617743882Theoretical CriminologyBook reviews
book-review2017
Theoretical Criminology
2018, Vol. 22(1) 133 –145
Book reviews
© The Author(s) 2017
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https://doi.org/10.1177/1362480617743882
DOI: 10.1177/1362480617743882
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T Linnemann, Meth Wars: Police, Media, Power, New York University Press: New York, 2016;
304 pp.: 9781479800025, $30.00 (pbk)
Reviewed by: Tammy Ayres, University of Leicester, UK
Meth Wars: Police, Media, Power is an insightful, engaging, witty and analytical analy-
sis of methamphetamine (meth) in the USA. The book provides an in-depth overview of
the topic, including how meth and the subsequent methamphetamine imaginary feeds
into the wider, albeit failing, war on drugs; a ‘war fought on the terrain of class relations’
(p. 225). Drawing heavily on cultural criminology and contemporary philosophers like
Slavoj Žižek and Jodie Dean, Linnemann successfully provides a contemporary, inter-
disciplinary and nuanced account, situating meth in the political and economic context of
late capitalism and its inherent inequalities. Portraying meth as a distinctly white, rural
problem confined to the ‘underclass’, ‘trailer trash’, Linnemann uses examples, case
studies, interviews and ethnographic research, alongside an analysis of popular culture,
pictures and the media to discuss what he terms the ‘methamphetamine imaginary’ (p. 1).
The methamphetamine imaginary is the construction of a rural populated by ‘white trash,
meth heads’ (p. 47); monsters that can only be controlled or annihilated via draconian,
zero-tolerance law-enforcement initiatives, as war is waged between good (police) and
evil (meth users and producers), in the fight against meth.
The methamphetamine imaginary exemplifies how ‘meth mediates the social world’
(p. 5). It depicts how the caricatures surrounding meth are created, perpetuated and legit-
imized by the...
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