The enduring social anxieties surrounding the illicit drug, methamphetamine (meth), offer a useful lens to view processes of criminalization and control as they unfold outside major population centers. Focusing on one year and an anti-meth legislative campaign, this paper maps the problematization of meth in the unique context of the rural Midwestern United States. Relying primarily on news media accounts, it illustrates various political and cultural currents constituting what is described as the “illicit methamphetamine industry.” The paper illustrates how, by overstating realities of use, politicizing official statistics and reframing key events, authorities discursively link meth control to the wars on drugs and terror and broader securitization projects. The paper concludes with a theoretical discussion of how control of one drug, in one state, fundamentally alters everyday life—even in small towns of the rural Midwest.
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