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The historical context of drug use by young people
Published in Ilana B. Crome, Richard Williams, Roger Bloor, Xenofon Sgouros, Substance Misuse and Young People, 2019
Although heroin use continued to increase during the 1990s, a new drug problem appeared in this decade which eclipsed heroin in its popularity. The amphetamine MDMA, or ecstasy, had been used since the mid-1980s by clubbers on the Spanish island of Ibiza, but, towards the end of the decade, the drug began to appear in British nightclubs. The development of the Acid House music scene was strongly associated with the use of ecstasy, often taken at large music events, or raves, atten ded by as many as 20,000 people (Hunt et al., 2011: 128–9). Convictions relating to ecstasy rose from just 289 in 1990 to 6,630 in 2000 (Home Office, 2000: 48). Yet, while ecstasy use may well have been common among a sub-set of young people, it was by no means ubiquitous. In 1994, the British Crime Survey found that 2.8 per cent of young adults (aged 16–30 years) had used ecstasy in the last year, compared to the 19.8 per cent of young people who admitted taking cannabis, the most widely used illicit drug (Shiner, 2009: 10). The risk to users’ health posed by ecstasy was hotly debated. The death of teenager Leah Betts in 1995, who had died after drinking too much water while taking ecstasy, prompted a media panic about the drug. The risk of death associated with taking ecstasy was low, between 1 in 650,000 and 1 in 3 million (Jansen, 2001: 93), but the Betts case echoed fears about the safety of young people, and particularly young women, that had been associated with drug use since at least the 1920s (Blackman, 2001: 170–4).
Social diseases? Crime and medicine in the Victorian press
Published in William F. Bynum, Stephen Lock, Roy Porter, Medical Journal’s and Medical Knowledge, 2019
The build-up in the coverage of poisoning was not simply a commercial device. The newspapers needed to sustain their interactive relationship with their readers and in the treatment of poison they found a means of identifying and redirecting a series of larger fears and preoccupations. The unsubstantiated increase in secret poisoning not only appeared to threaten the security of the individual in the privacy of his or her own home but to endanger the entire fabric of society. Like garroting in the 1860s, poisoning became the focus for what has been called media panic.38 This was orchestrated in various ways through the press. The regular accumulation of such special headings as ‘More Poisonings – Wilful Murder at Deptford’ or ‘Horrible Tragedy – Another Case of Wholesale Poisoning’ was not limited to the popular Sundays and was combined with a consistently gloomy social prognosis.39 This is a ‘Poisoning Aera’ announced the Pictorial Times in 1847, receiving unexpected support for this view from Dr Taylor in the preface to his book on poisons.40 The commentary which ran alongside this coverage, particularly during the major trials, was usually expressed in the most lurid terms. Thomas Boyle has demonstrated the intricate cross-referencing between crime reporting and sensation fiction, particularly after 1855, and it is sometimes hard to separate the elements in the heightened language of the press. ‘The poison fiend is abroad, ’ wrote a contributor to the London Journal in 1856, ‘the fell spirit of the Borgias is stalking through English society’.41 Even the Medical Times felt inclined to refer to the ‘dreadful epidemic of wickedness which now overspreads the land like a pestilence’.42
“Almost Looks Illegal”: Family Dick’s Daddy’s Little Boy Gay Pornography Series and Its Too-Young Look
Published in Journal of Homosexuality, 2022
I should also acknowledge, as is suggested by the diversity of views contained in the audience comments, that such esthetics have, too, been the basis of more paranoid readings of the VHS revolution, in both horror cinema and moral/media panic news cycles, which could be anchored to readings of Family Dick as well. To take one example, The Ring (the 2002 US version) reconfigures the then-dying videocassette as its “bugaboo” (see Benson-Allott, 2007), and a sinister method of re-recording homegrown atrocities and family brutalities; a conception of the media that had already played out through the 1980s and ’90s, when anxieties manifested through representations of the medium as a “video nasty” revolution that gnawed at the fabric of the once-wholesome home—the James Bulger killing and resultant moral panic (see Hay, 1995) is a ’90s example, which through reporting and the popular imaginary, cast the VHS as a portal to the denigration and destruction of underage boys’ bodies and minds. It is worthwhile holding such contrasting assessments of meaning and morality—and the esthetics such assessments froth—front of mind as we move through the analysis of Family Dick, and the views of those watching it.