It is safe to say that drug use, especially its legality, moral and ethical aspects, is a hot topic in public discourse. It is also no secret that drug use is stigmatized in many societies. The primary sources of stigma are the media and society itself. Goode (2015) notes that “the details are different, but the common element is the hysteria generated over the use of a novel substance, initially believed to be far more harmful than it eventually turns out to be” (p. 133). People who abuse drugs and those undergoing treatment become a discriminated group. Therefore, mass media panic and stigmatization of drug use worsens the drug users’ living conditions, mental state, and treatment outcomes.
Article Summary
A peer-reviewed journal article chosen for this work is Social Stigmatization of Drug Abusers in a Developing Country: A Cross-Sectional Study by Khalid et al. Their work explores the implications of media bias towards drugs and drug abusers. The researchers aimed to find out how social stigma affects the outcome of drug addiction treatment. The study setting was “the Psychiatry Department, Mayo Hospital Lahore, Pakistan” (Khalid et al., 2020, p. 1). A population-based cross-sectional study was applied to gather the necessary information, and then the data obtained were analyzed using the Statistical Package for the Social Sciences 20 (Khalid et al., 2020). They found that stigmatized patients experience low self-esteem and mild depression.
New Social Pyramid
The described journal article, together with facts from Drugs in American Society, provides important insights into the issue of drug use. By manipulating data and exaggerating the negative aspects of the situation, the media and elites create an informational panic around drugs (Goode, 2015). It is done for several reasons, namely drawing attention to their brands, getting traffic from clickbait headlines, and profiting from sensational news articles. Goode (2015) notes that by doing this, elites divert “attention from the fundamental problems of society, like inequality” (p. 145). Driven by biased or even false information, society stigmatizes drug use and discriminates against people who use drugs. It worsens the living conditions of drug abusers and the people around them. They become socially isolated and lose access to upward mobility. It leads to such phenomena as drug wars and drug violence from which drug users and bystanders suffer (Goode, 2015). Moreover, as noted above, it impairs their mental health and negatively affects patient outcomes. (Khalid et al.). From these two readings, one can build a social pyramid of drug stigmatization.
Conclusion
This work analyzes two works related to the general theme of which is the social condemnation of drug use. They are Erich Goode’s Drugs in American Society and Social Stigmatization of Drug Abusers in a Developing Country: A Cross-Sectional Study by Khalid et al. The facts, conclusions, and assumptions of them were considered in relation to each other. Consequently, a new social pyramid of drug stigmatization with elites at the top and drag users at the bottom were developed. It has been discovered that elites and the media work together to manipulate society to discriminate against people who use drugs in order to cover up real problems and profit from the mass hysteria. It can be assumed that further research on this topic could help to create new social services for drug users and countermeasures to combat media misinformation.
References
Goode, E. (2015). Drugs in American society (9th ed.). McGraw-Hill Education.
Khalid, F., Jaan, A., Aslam, M. M. S., Ahmed, Z., Raheem, A., Bodla, Z. H., Basit, A., Hussain, B., Iftikhar, A., Tayyeb, M., Khalid, A., & Rehman, U. (2020). Social stigmatization of drug abusers in a developing country: A cross-sectional study. Cureus, 12(9), 1-7. doi:10.7759/cureus.10661