Pubdate: Sat, 09 Jun 2012
Source: Vancouver Sun (CN BC)
Copyright: 2012 The Vancouver Sun
Contact: http://www.canada.com/vancouversun/letters.html
Website: http://www.canada.com/vancouversun/
Details: http://www.mapinc.org/media/477
Author: Peter McKnight

ZOMBIE REPORTS FUEL DRUG FRENZY, AGAIN

After ' bath salts' were said to be behind a cannibalism case in the 
U. S., politicians jumped on the criminalization bandwagon

As a message of vital public importance, the U.S. Centers for Disease 
Control and Prevention wants you to know that there is no zombie 
apocalypse. Seriously.

I know, it sounds like a headline from the satirical newsmagazine The 
Onion - and I had to check repeatedly to ensure it wasn't an Onion 
story. But it is apparently legitimate, given that CDC spokesman 
David Daigle recently emailed the Huffington Post stating, "CDC does 
not know of a virus or condition that would reanimate the dead (or 
one that would present zombielike symptoms)."

The CDC's necromantic turn is, of course, the result of a number of 
high-profile "zombie" cases, and in particular the case of Rudy 
Eugene, who was shot dead by Miami police after attacking and 
cannibalizing Ronald Poppo.

According to some reports, Eugene continued eating Poppo's face even 
after being shot, which gave rise to the zombie rumours. And 
according to a Miami police officer - not a toxicology report, but a 
cop, and one who wasn't even involved in the case - Eugene looked 
like he might have been on the designer drug known as "bath salts."

That was enough for the credulous media, as they dutifully reported 
the alleged bath salts connection - and, better yet, quickly found 
dozens of cases of zombie cannibals. Indeed, "zombie apocalypse" 
became one of the highest trending items on Google, with a Google.com 
search of "bath salts" and "zombies" still returns more than five million hits.

So one can understand why the CDC felt the need to set the record 
straight. And as a report from the Canadian Centre on Substance Abuse 
(CCSA) and the Canadian Community Epidemiology Network on Drug Use 
details, the record on bath salts is one that will surely disappoint 
aspiring necromancers.

The report, which mercifully avoids mentioning zombies, notes that 
bath salts are amphetamine-like synthetic stimulants sold in "head 
shops" and over the Internet. More specifically, bath salts typically 
contain methyl-enedioxypyrovalerone (MDPV), methylone or mephedrone, 
synthetic cathinones "similar to naturally occurring cathinones found 
in the Khat plant, a shrub native to the Horn of Africa and the 
Arabian Peninsula."

Furthermore, "Individuals under the influence of these substances 
report hallucinations, paranoia, chest pain and blurry vision and 
appear agitated and combative." Not exactly a day at the beach, to be 
sure, but not exactly the equivalent of raising the dead either.

Nonetheless, now that the zombie reports have reached epidemic 
pro-portions, it's unlikely some journalists will let any pesky facts 
get in the way of sensational stories. After all, we've been here 
before, and the facts didn't matter then.

That's right, we've tangled with zombies before. In fact, just seven 
years ago, when "meth mania" was at its peak, the infamous Newsweek 
cover story, "America's Most Dangerous Drug," detailed how people 
became "zombies" while under the influence of the dark crystal.

Before that there were ecstasy zombies and crack (cocaine) zombies 
and LSD zombies and, most famous of all thanks to movies like Reefer 
Madness, marijuana zombies. Charging that a drug turns people into 
zombies is therefore the rule rather than the exception.

In fact, everything about the reporting on bath salts follows the 
rules - that is, conforms to the tried-and-true methodology for 
producing drug panics. That methodology, discussed by Philip Jenkins 
in his book Synthetic Panics: The Symbolic Politics of Designer 
Drugs, begins with reports of harrowing claims made by authorities, 
usually law enforcement officials - much like the Miami police 
officer who suggested Rudy Eugene was on bath salts.

The putative problem is then typically framed using a variety of 
rhetorical devices, including characterizing the drug as a "rape 
drug" or the "serial killer of drugs," and users as "zombies."

And since the audience is already somewhat inured to such rhetoric, 
having heard it many times before, the media will often present the 
newest threat as worse than anything that's gone before - as in a 
recent CNN story, in which bath salts are described as "PCP on crack."

Usage is also invariably described as "epidemic," a metaphor that, 
Jenkins explains, presents the substance as a health menace 
comparable to an infectious disease. And the use of the word 
"epidemic" does not in any way depend on usage rates - for example, a 
Google News search of "bath salts" and "epidemic" returns thou-sands 
of results, despite limited use of the drug in the U.S., and, 
according to the CCSA, only 14 confirmed cases reported to Canadian 
health authorities, all in Nova Scotia.

Nevertheless, sensationalized media reports inevitably lead to the 
criminalization of drugs, even when politicians are utterly ignorant 
of the drug, as they were of cannabis when it was criminalized in 
1923, and as they are of bath salts now.

Sure enough, the feds announced this week that MDPV will be 
criminalized this fall. (Mephedrone and methylone are already 
illegal, as they are deemed to be similar to amphetamine.)

Now of course one can make a strong argument that criminalization 
merely exacerbates, or even creates, drug problems. But as Erich 
Goode and Nachman Ben-Yehuda explain in Moral Panics: The Social 
Construction of Deviance, criminalization also allows politicians to 
appear tough on crime and to look like they care about social ills, 
while really doing very little.

Indeed, it will require a lot more than criminalizing a drug to solve 
the problems that led Rudy Eugene to nearly kill a man, and that led 
home-less man Ronald Poppo to become an easy target. But unlike 
making new laws, such problems aren't solved with the stroke of a pen.

Furthermore, many commentators have noted that such panics present us 
with a distorted picture of the dangers of various drugs, and hence 
lead to improper policy responses. While bath salts will soon become 
a Schedule I (most serious) drug in the Con-trolled Drugs and 
Substances Act, just as methamphetamine became a Schedule I during 
the meth hysteria of 2005, we still largely ignore the most dangerous 
drug of all: alcohol.

The dangers of alcohol are well documented. In a 2007 Lancet report, 
for example, British psychopharmacologist David Nutt and other 
experts ranked 20 psychoactive drugs according to 16 criteria. 
Alcohol came out on top, followed by heroin and crack cocaine, while 
khat, with its naturally occurring cathinones, placed a lowly 15th.

In a 2007 report titled Comparing the Perceived Seriousness and 
Actual Costs of Substance Abuse in Canada, the CCSA also stressed the 
comparative damage done by alcohol, emphasizing that the "direct 
social and economic costs associated with alcohol ($7.4 billion) were 
more than twice the costs associated with illicit drugs ($3.6 billion.)"

Given our punitive approach to "demon" drugs, one would expect 
politicians to make alcohol a Schedule I drug, tout de suite. But 
that would really put a damper on state dinners, and besides, there 
are no stories about alcohol zombies - or at least there haven't been 
since Prohibition.

But zombies abound, nonetheless. Just listen to some in the media 
drone on about face-eating cannibals and watch politicians sleepwalk 
their way through criminalizing yet another drug, and notice who the 
real zombies are.
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MAP posted-by: Jay Bergstrom