‘This is your face on meth’: The punitive spectacle of ‘white trash’ in the rural war on drugs
| Date | 01 August 2013 |
| DOI | 10.1177/1362480612468934 |
| Author | Travis Linnemann,Tyler Wall |
| Published date | 01 August 2013 |
| Subject Matter | Articles |
468934TCR17310.1177/1362480612468934Theoretical CriminologyLinnemann and Wall
2013
Article
Theoretical Criminology
17(3) 315 –334
‘This is your face on meth’:
© The Author(s) 2013
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The punitive spectacle of
DOI: 10.1177/1362480612468934
tcr.sagepub.com
‘white trash’ in the rural
war on drugs
Travis Linnemann*
Old Dominion University, USA
Tyler Wall
Eastern Kentucky University, USA
Abstract
This article engages the dynamic role of the crime image and more specifically the mug
shot, in a contemporary anti-methamphetamine media campaign known as ‘Faces of
Meth’. Understood here as a pedagogical policing program, Faces of Meth attempts to
deter methamphetamine use through graphic ‘before meth’ and ‘after meth’ images of
the faces of white meth users. Our objective is not to evaluate the actual effectiveness
of these fear appeals. Rather we discuss how the photographs are largely structured by
and embedded within already existing cultural anxieties about the figure of ‘white trash’,
reflecting both the dominance and precariousness of white social position.
Keywords
Abjection, methamphetamine, spectacle, whiteness, white trash
Sometimes described as ‘America’s most dangerous drug’ (Jefferson, 2005) metham-
phetamine (meth) has haunted the public’s imagination for decades (see Jenkins, 1994),
circulating in both popular culture and official discourses of the relentless war on drugs.
Like other drugs, a language of contagion and catastrophic visions of ‘plagues’ and ‘epi-
demics’ circumscribe the current meth panic. Forecasting such an epidemic, the PBS
*This work is a collaboration, authors appear in alphabetical order.
Corresponding author:
Travis Linnemann, Sociology and Criminal Justice, Old Dominion University, 6012 Batten Arts and Letters,
Norfolk, VA 23529, USA.
Email: tlinnema@odu.edu
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Theoretical Criminology 17(3)
documentary series Frontline recently launched ‘an investigation into how and why
meth use spiraled out of control and became the fastest-growing drug abuse problem in
America’. The film aptly titled ‘The meth epidemic’ opens with harrowing reports from
users claiming ‘meth destroys communities’ and small-town police warning the drug
‘takes everything good in your life’. Regardless of theatrical discourse, describing meth
use as an epidemic is an overstatement at best (Weisheit and White, 2009: 10). In fact, at
the time of this writing, the Government’s own estimates were just half of the prior
year’s, dropping to around 350,000 regular users or about one-tenth of 1 percent of the
US population (SAMHSA, 2011). By comparison, nearly 30 times as many abuse pre-
scription narcotics and only PCP, LSD and heroin are used less (SAMHSA, 2011).
Regardless of the gap between ‘the real’ and ‘the represented’, or between ‘substance’
and ‘semblance’, methamphetamine, as the anecdotes above attest, remains a vibrant
social imaginary of criminal transgression intimately entwined with rural America
(Tunnell and Donnermeyer, 2007). Writing on the supposed ‘meth epidemic’ and its
intractable rurality, journalist Scott Anderson’s (2012) Shadow People: How Meth-
Driven Crime Is Eating at the Heart of Rural America, elaborates the imaginary:
Grover Graham saw shadow people. The term refers to hallucinogenic figures glimpsed by
methamphetamine addicts after days without sleep. But in reality it’s the addicts themselves
who are living in a shadow, growing in numbers, becoming an alarming subculture on the
periphery of rural America, engaging in crimes that are having devastating impact on places
where traditional life is valued most … Meth touches the fields of Iowa and Nebraska and the
lives of men hauling chisel plows through slow erupting soil, until the sun fires clouds like
shining wheat, until high school gymnasiums fill with screaming parents, until pickup trucks
sail under water towers basked in the gorgeous light of a dying afternoon … Meth touches
countless shades of the rural dream. Those who live on the original outlands and search for
inspiration in the country’s past feel its Kaiser blade through felonies, through ongoing acts that
continue to eviscerate their communities, cutting them apart, one piece at a time.
(Anderson, 2012: 13)
Instead of meth-induced hallucinations, Anderson’s ghostly ‘shadow people’ are a nas-
cent criminal class, plaguing lands where ‘traditional life’ is supposedly ‘valued most’.
Haunting the ‘countless shades of the rural dream’, these spectral scapegoats obfuscate
long-standing anxieties over withering populations, uneven economic development and
grim poverty.
Like spectral ‘shadow people’ the punitive imagination of meth as criminal transgres-
sion, particularly in the United States, appears as images of zombie-like corporeal ruin—
scarred sunken faces, blisters, and broken rotting teeth or ‘meth mouth’ (see Murakawa,
2011). A widespread cultural imaginary, the ‘meth zombie’ is found in films like The
Salton Sea and Spun, where characters go days without sleep and relentlessly tear away
decaying flesh chasing illusory ‘meth bugs’ (Linnemann, 2010). Strike up a conversation
about the drug and talk inevitably turns to damaged bodies, rotting teeth, and mutilated
flesh—and all too often in our experiences, accounts of ‘meth heads’ as ‘white trash’.
See Figure 1.
Linnemann and Wall
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Figure 1. ‘Meth mouth’.
To unpack the popular ‘white trash meth head’ trope, we engage the dynamic role of
the crime image and more specifically the mug shot in a contemporary United States
anti-methamphetamine campaign, viewing it as a key site where this particular cultural
aesthetic is articulated and circulated. In 2004, the Multnomah County (Oregon) Sheriff
Department launched a ‘drug education program’—trademarked as ‘Faces of Meth’
(FOM). According to the project’s website, deputy Brian King developed the program
from mug shots of individuals with a history of meth use that he had booked into the
county jail. The ‘Faces of Meth’ campaign aims to deter potential users, particularly
young children and teenagers, with graphic images of the corporeal decay supposedly
caused by the drug. The tactic, understood here as a pedagogical policing project, is
facilitated by an officer’s ‘realistic presentation’ of meth-wrecked bodies. The point is
said to simply ‘be honest with kids’ by showing them normal ‘before meth’ and shocking
‘after meth’ images of user’s faces (Faces of Meth, 2005). Though very critical of ‘fear
appeals’ and interminable warnings of ‘meth epidemics’, our aim here is not to evaluate
the actual deterrent effects of the program. And though we take issue with this particular
anti-drug program, we in no way dismiss the agonies of drug use and arrest as trivial.
Rather, we argue the Faces of Meth campaign powerfully demonstrates how images and
visuality are key features of contemporary punishment.
Recently, Keith Hayward (2010: 3) and collaborators called for a critical visual
criminology—an orientation that takes images seriously and strives for an analysis
capable of ‘encompassing meaning, affect, situation, symbolic power and efficiency,
and the spectacle in the same frame’. Following this call, we confront these ‘faces of
meth’ in order to excavate various cultural and political dynamics at work between the
image and disparate social imaginaries of penal spectacle and spectatorship.
Consequently, the ‘faces’ should not be understood simply as representations of the
social effects of drug use, but rather as a social practice or social force that is dynamic,
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Theoretical Criminology 17(3)
material and performative (see Carney, 2010). Further, because of meth’s profound
racialization and contrived rurality we view the project as an instance where efforts to
‘govern through crime’ do not focus solely on racial minorities and the inner city poor
(Simon, 2007: 20). Thus, Faces of Meth should not be seen as a simple ‘fear appeal’
public service announcement, but a project that polices moral boundaries and fabricates
social order (see Neocleous, 2000) through the specter of a ‘white trash’ Other who
threatens the supposed purity of hegemonic whiteness and white social position (see
Webster, 2008).
By first focusing on the project’s core premise ‘See what will happen if you use
meth?’ we illustrate how the logics of pedagogical policing manifest in the visual. Next,
we describe how this logic unavoidably leads to and is in fact inseparable from the
enduring problematic, ‘Why would someone do that to themselves?’ Confronting this
problematic, we illustrate how Faces of Meth and similar programs, further embed the
individual rational conception of drug use within dominant criminal justice discourses,
reaffirming the disparate racialized and classed contours of penal spectacle and abject
Others.
Faces of Meth: ‘let the evidence speak for itself’
In 2004, deputy Brian King began collecting the mug shots of people he booked into the
county jail with a history of meth use. King believed the images were so powerful that
they could instruct citizens, especially school-aged children, why they should not and
must not use methamphetamine. As the FOM exhibit in Figure 2 shows, two ‘mug shots’
arranged in simple causal order, deliver powerful visual evidence of meth’s devastating
effects.
Despite problems inherent to ‘shock tactics’ and the punitive display of abject bodies,
which we focus on here, there are a number of...
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