This year, The Times published an article talking about ketamine use in universities, calling it “The Hidden Campus Killer”.
As Paul North- director of drugs reform platform Volteface – explains, it’s a great example of how the mainstream media problematically misinform the public around drugs.
Right now in the UK, we have more drug related deaths than we ever have done before. And if you go into universities and speak to students, if you go to nightclubs that students are visiting. If you go to festivals, if you speak to people in welfare teams, you’ll clearly see that drug related harm is a problem among students.
And the other thing you will clearly see is that what we’ve been doing to date is in’t reducing that issue, it isn’t addressing that issue. There is a shift in the way in which universities are dealing with drug related harm and drug related problems. And what they’ve been doing is they’ve been speaking to groups that operate and work in the harm reduction space and essentially have been gathering and following the best available evidence from around the world as to how they can reduce drug related harm.
Now, there’s a change in policy approach because they’re sick of seeing drug related harm and deaths. It’s quite sensible. It’s based on global evidence base and it’s absolutely not decriminalisation in any way, shape or form. Possession of the drug is still illegal. If you are caught by the police, it’s still going to be a criminal charge.
When this article was released, it didn’t educate the reader on the reality of harm reduction. What’s the logic? What’s the evidence behind it? Why are universities starting to change their approach with regards to drug use? Instead, the article did the absolute opposite of that, and it started to create a sense of a fear.
Another thing they do, which is common in many areas of policy and reporting, is try and dehumanise the individual. And the way in which the media do that with ketamine is they talk about it as a horse tranquilliser. This is a really common way for the media to talk about ketamine. Now, ketamine is used in the veterinary world. It is used pre-surgery on horses, but it’s also used up and down the country all the time in loads of medical settings. In dentistry. In mainstream hospital care.
And it’s also more recently been used as a psychedelic assisted therapy to help people overcome trauma and fear.
There’s also some really interesting research around how ketamine has been used to help people recover and get over problematic alcohol use. So ketamine is not just a horse tranquilliser but the way in which the journalist talks about it would insinuate to the reader that just picked up the article. Oh man, I can’t believe students have got their hands on this whole tranquilliser.
It even goes as far to say that horses are the main user of the drug, which is absolute nonsense. Like humans are by far the most common use of the drugs, one as a recreational product, and two in medical settings. So it’s like that kind of twisting of the information there that takes the reader on a journey that makes them feel like, “I can’t believe they’re doing this.”
It’s a bit like the way in which they might talk about spice or bath salts. You kind of make it feel as though the use of the drug just defies logic. Like, “Why would any why would anybody do that?”
What we’re seeing around the world is Western drug policies change quite rapidly. We’ve seen the liberalisation of cannabis. We’re seeing the decriminalisation of drugs. So you’re starting to see this shift. And you are having people, whether it be media outlets or politicians, struggling to come to terms with that, because what they want to be true is they want, the whole drug policy issue, which is very complicated,
They want it to just be as simple as, “Let’s just tell them it’s bad. And then by telling them it’s bad, they’ll just not do it. And if they’re not listening, let’s punish them because punishments stop people doing things. Drug related harm is an issue that many jurisdictions around the world face. And here in the UK we’re seeing more drug related death and drug related harm.
And you can look to other jurisdictions around the world and you see a similar thing. People’s drug use is becoming problematic and becoming worse. It’s a complex problem. It’s a problem with a lot of details in that you have to examine. But what is particularly frustrating with the media and with politicians is they don’t use the opportunity to really sit down, understand the problem and implement something which is going to be effective.
Yet Priti Patel’s quote right off the bat suggests as though, “Now you’re just going to get all these drug crimes and now people are going to have blood on their hands.” That to me is borderline misinformation. This is becoming a growing problem. When media outlets talk about drug policy, they find people on the extremes to say things and create feelings of outrage and frustration and in some ways, panic.
So there’s this kind of disconnect that’s occurring with politicians. There’s this disconnect that’s occurring with the media. But furthermore, I think we’re living in an age now where drugs are a very sexy issue for a journalist. If you talk to someone about drug use, they could be completely uneducated on the issue, yet they will have a strong opinion.
So when you have areas of policy that create moral instinctual responses – immigration is another one – then it becomes a very attractive piece to write about because if we look at the way in which the mainstream media wants to interact with the public, the mainstream media wants to write and create stories which are widely and broadly shared on social media channels, which increases traffic to their website, which makes their advertisers happy.
But they also want to create brand loyalty. You know, papers have become a brand. Papers think about marketing. And what do brands do? Brands want to create customer loyalty. A good brand will find a way for their customer to keep coming back, year after year, week after week, day after day, saying, “I like you, we get on. I’m going to keep giving you money.”
And the way in which papers are doing that is, when they have an issue that has a strong reaction, rather than saying to the reader, “We have a responsibility here to bring a bit of nuance to this story or educate you, or bring to light new emerging evidence.” What the media will do is say, “We have a loyalty here to make you feel a thing that makes you want to pick up a paper the next time you see it.”
So what they end up doing is end up just being a mirror for that individual’s view. So when they grab these morally complex subjects and this happens on the left as well, I don’t think the left are very good reporting on drug policy. I think we have issues on the left, we have issues on the right with this is.
They are very selective about what they say, they present it in a careful manner, which makes the reader just reinforce their position. I think the media are getting worse at this. Another thing that’s very interesting about the article is it actually speaks to individuals who have had people close to them, that have passed and died due to drug related overdoses and and drug use.
And in the middle of the article it starts to touch on this sort of viewpoint, that stigma drives people away. So, if you have really harsh punishments, really scary punishments and you say, “Drugs are a bad thing, so immoral, if you do it, you’re going to get in trouble.” We tend to find these people move away from support services and hide things and it moves underground. And there’s some quotes in there and some case studies in that they kind of bring to light.
So the journalist has obviously done some investigation and spoken to people who have experienced drug related harm and said, “What’s happened here? What is the issue? Oh, stigma. Okay, interesting. So maybe the existing policies in universities create this stigma and it’s that stigma that stops people seeking help.” Yet the article then just abandons that as a concept and then goes back to, you know, “These student groups that have infiltrated universities are going to try and twist and change policies.” It doesn’t recognise its own conclusion its investigation came to. What I think happens at the moment with a lot of the media is it’s not so much that they don’t misinform the public by lying to them. You know, that journalist has gone and spoken to people who’ve experienced great harm, but he only gives you bits of the truth and he doesn’t compile it in a way that takes the reader on a sensible journey.
It fragments it and splits it, you know, it scares you at the beginning, gives you a little bit of truth in the middle, and then stresses you out again at the end. So one of the harms of this kind of reporting in the mainstream media is it then has a knock on effects of lots of other kind of smaller blogs and outlets who pick up on the story. A really interesting case to do with this, actually, something that happened a couple of years ago with Sadiq Khan, where Sadiq Khan basically announced that he was going to do a very small pilot in the borough of Lewisham in which they would trial something that’s called an ‘arrest referral scheme’, used up and down the country, completely common, drug arrest referral schemes are used all over the place. And what happens on one of those referral schemes is if someone is caught in possession of a lot of drugs, they are given an opportunity to go talk to someone about it and get help rather than straight away get a conviction.
If they don’t turn up for the appointment, they still get a conviction. If they’ve had a couple of these already they don’t get any more, they go straight to a conviction. And if they were carrying like more than just a small amount of for personal use, then they get a conviction. So it’s not that liberal. It’s absolutely not decriminalisation.
The way in which the media reported that was as though like, “Sadiq Khan and decriminalise drugs, Sadiq Khan to decriminalise ketamine and cannabis.” What then happens from that initial story is loads of places just read the article and nothing else, and then they start writing about the subject. So they build upon the foundations of inaccuracy that is originally reported. So that has a slight knock on effect and creates more confusion, more inaccuracies over the issue.
So the real tragedy of the issue is that we have a problem with drug related deaths in the UK. We have students are experiencing harm and we have a number of universities instead of just doing what comes naturally, what feels instinctual is a starting to look at the global evidence base on doing something different, and rather than the mainstream media reporting about that and present that information factually to its readers, instead, because it invokes strong reactions, it gets people to come back to the mainstream media and read it again, share the article.
They push it to the extremity. So a place that is an inaccurate representation of what’s really going on. They use data in a way that makes us feel like it’s a way bigger issue than it is. They bring people to the table and get quotes from people like Priti Patel to paint a picture as though pure chaos is going to ensue if a policy is put forward.
And that’s not what actually is going on. And that’s the real tragedy of the issue. Instead of the mainstream media, instead of educating and talking to the public about what’s really going on. Instead we’re over in here having meaningless discussions which aren’t an accurate representation of what’s really going on.
