The Social Construction of Opioid Addicts: Addiction, Blame, and Race

• In Event: Deaths of Despair? Framing the Opioid Epidemic

Abstract

Many regions of the country have faced an epidemic of deaths related to the abuse of prescription drugs -- particularly opioids prescribed to address pain. Recent accounts of this epidemic trace its modern origins to practices of pharmaceutical companies to promote the prescription of opioids and reassurances that the new generation of medicines were not addictive. The emergence of this crisis from the 1990s to today provides an opportunity to see the dynamics of a novel policy area and to assess how a policy cements within the policy system as well as the understanding and imagination of the public. In particular, this domain allows us to see the emergence and competition between alternative social constructions of the victims of this crisis -- those addicted to prescription opioids.

In this paper, we will analyze media coverage of the opioid crisis from 2007 to 2017 using the Vanderbilt
Television News Archive. We will use human coding of the text of the television news broadcasts that discuss opioid addiction (or other forms of drug addiction) to assess:

1. The relative level of coverage of prescription opioid addiction compared to other drug addiction
2. The relative frequency of language related to addiction as a disease (rather than a moral failing) in coverage of prescription opioid addiction compared to other forms of drug addiction
3. The relative frequency of references to race and place in coverage of prescription opioid addiction to other forms of drug addiction

The results allow us to investigate the intersection of the social constructions of prescription drug addicts, race, and geography (particularly region and rurality). We hope that these results will illustrate the importance of considering the intersecting social identities ascribed to the targets of social policies.

Authors

• Scott E. Robinson, University of Oklahoma

• Lauren Glenn Reinke, University of Oklahoma