Governing through meth: Local politics,drug control and the drift toward securitization

From policing the crisis to governing through risk

The empirical framework follows Hall et al.’s (1978) influential Policing the Crisis (PTC) by seeking to demonstrate how actors seized upon key events to fit a particular ideological vantage, gather public support for a set of social control practices, secure funding and further political candidacy. In this way, the case detailed here may be easy to write off as an engineered moral panic, especially given the purposeful focus on one year and one state.

However, thinking beyond episode and catastrophe, we confront Michelle Brown’s “sad paradox” and question, “how living with the crisis came to be simply living” (Brown, 2008: 132). Thus, departing from PTC, the paper demonstrates how authorities access the insecurity linked to meth in a way to render it useful for governance and the securitization of everyday life. More importantly, it asks how the suspicion and anxiety inseparable from securitization settles in and remains long after the crisis recedes.

As powerfully illustrated by PTC, moral panics arise from and obscure widening fissures in institutions and challenges to the dominant social order. In this way, PTC broke ground, illustrating how law-and-order authoritarianism lent itself as the best, perhaps the only, means to order in times of crisis—thus “foreshadowing governmentality, actuarialism, and the new penology” (Brown, 2008: 132). So now, more than 30 years on, we assume, at least to an extent, arrival of the “law-and-order” society envisaged by PTC (Hall et al., 1978: 306). Whether this reflects cultures of control (Garland, 2001), fear (Bauman, 2006; Glassner, 2010), insecurity (Erickson, 2007), or the rise of an altogether new type of authoritarianism (Hallsworth and Lea, 2011) is yet to be seen.

It is said that governments these days—particularly in the US—govern through crime (Simon, 2007). “Zero tolerance” policing regimes and innovative regulations remake public space at the behest of private capital, pushing the poor and homeless further to the margins of social life and physical space (see Beckett and Herbert, 2010; Ferrell, 2001). The remaining welfare programs display crime control logics proudly—imposing intrusive drug screens as “common sense” requirements of public assistance—and reveal blurring lines between support and outright coercion. Some argue that these fields form an “assistantial-carceral” mesh governing the dispossessed through coercive workfare and repressive criminal justice simultaneously (Wacquant, 2009: 99).

Even if so, these sorts of governmental projects are not inescapable or self-justifying and require citizen input by means of tacit consent, if not open support. Consent is won through steady warnings of the enemy other. However, whereas the state once directed public attention towards symbolic dangers of delinquent youth and various crises, an increasingly vast inventory of behaviors, criminal or not, are framed as risk and thus an issue of security (Zedner, 2009). Criminology has a complicated and blossoming relationship with risk. For devotees of Beck’s (1992) risk society, loosening institutional structures shifting under forces of modernization and industrialization wrought fundamental changes in cultural conceptions of danger (Mythern and Walklate, 2006: 383). In such a risk society, pre-industrial concerns for natural disaster give way to manufactured risks brought on by technological advancements of modernity. Circulating in the economic, political and environmental ether, concern for risks reduce everyday social interactions to a reflexivity of avoidance, reduction and management.

Those writing from a governmentality vantage (see Rose et al., 2006) are also concerned with risk, but in patently different ways. From this perspective, risk definitions are expressions of power and methods formaintaining order and governance (O’Malley, 2010). As such, this tradition is less concerned with eventualities of things like terrorism and crime and more with how governing them fabricates order and regulates populations and territories. On a number of key points, the case detailed here more aptly reflects the governmentality of meth control, what I term, “governing through meth” as opposed to a “realist” conception of risk (Zedner, 2007).

As will be described, the tactics employed to govern through meth are less concerned with apprehending, prosecuting or even punishing and more concerned with warning the public of meth’s risks and reducing the conditions said to contribute to them. Additionally, anti-meth projects do not rely solely on formal policing activities but also activate citizen responsibilization and suspicion. Second, the temporal or pre-crime shift links meth to broader risk management domains, some not directly related to crime. In this case, meth discursively links to a broad array of risks ranging from natural disaster and environmental hazards, to terrorism (Zedner, 2007). Together, anti-meth projects form a regime drawing on a diversity of agencies and actors, while acting through a foreground of criminal justice. In addition, state agencies and various private entities and experts have vested personal interests in anti-meth projects. Thus, as vocation and an object of consumption, meth securitization relies on perpetual reimagination of risks in new forms and spaces to carry it forward (Goold et al., 2010). Viewing the anti-meth regime as a singular entity usefully avoids unnecessary distinctions between public, private, foreign, and domestic policing projects and situates anti-meth activities within a continuum of state power.

Securing the rural

Problematizations of meth as “America’s most dangerous drug” are useful for governance only because they draw on localized notions of space and identity. As creative constructs, drug panics threaten some spaces and bodies more than others. Crack cocaine, for example, is so profoundly racialized it irrevocably links to inner-city ghettos and people of color (Bogazianos, 2012). Meth is constructed in many of the same ways. Sometimes called “white man’s crack,” it is commonly associated with poor whites in rural areas and rural states (Linnemann, 2010). Former Oklahoma Governor Frank Keating provides a tremendous example of this kind of reasoning:

It’s a white trash drug-methamphetamines largely are consumed by the lower socio-economic element of white people and I think we need to shame it. Just like crack cocaine was a black-trash drug and is a black trash drug. (Senate Communications Division, 1999)

The Governor’s depiction of meth as a “white trash” referent to crack cocaine reimagines bodies and spaces along a racial hiearchy of whiteness. It follows that a “crack epidemic” racialized and linked to inner-city ghettos is less conceivable in primarily white and rural states like Kansas, than are risks of a “white trash” “trailer-park high.” Confirming these binaries, surveys of Kansas police consistently name meth the greatest “drug threat” (NDIC, 2009) even though cocaine users outnumber meth users by a large margin (ONDCP, 2008). Disparity between law enforcement’s assessment of risk and “the real” of meth use indicated by the number of users and seized labs reveals its utility for governance.

However, meth’s rurality is less concrete, as is the notion of rurality itself. As Bell (2007) put it, “it is an annoying question, if not an alarming one, that…sociologists have never comfortably resolved for themselves: what is the rural?” (Bell, 2007: 401). Quantitative definitions, what Bell calls “first rural,” are most common. These definitions typically derive meaning in binary relation to urban spaces (Bell, 2007). Unsurprisingly, the US government uses numerous definitions like this, confusing the concept, even between related agencies. ¹ Given obvious shortcomings, Bell’s “second rural” informed by culture and “ghosts of place” is perhaps more useful here. Bell describes:

Second rural, then, is a rural of associations. It calls upon the connections we have long made between rural life and food, cultivation, community, nature, wild freedom, and masculine patriarchal power, and the many contradictions we have also so long associated with the rural, such as desolation, isolation, dirt and disease, wild danger, and the straw-hatted rube. It is the rural of what Williams called the “golden echo” of rural goodness, as well the “leaden echo” of the rural we fear and reject. It is romantic. It is terrifying. It is empowering. It is imprisoning. It is Never Cry Wolf. It is Deliverance. It is The Wizard of Oz. It is The Grapes of Wrath. Second rural, the rural of ideas, is by no means always ideal. (Bell, 2007: 409)

This “rural of ideas” is sensitive to “invisible othernesses interrogating intersections of power and culture in the rural” (Bell, 2007: 409). For most, various technical definitions of urban and rural imposed by government agencies are meaningless. Rather, the public draws on the rural of ideas to locate the other among unknown racial and cultural homogeneities and less-traveled spaces like Kansas. Likewise, some hold the idealized “golden echo of rural goodness” against indicators of change brought on by things like “meth epidemics.” With its small population and relatively low crime and incarceration rates, Kansas is usually absent from national policy debates, especially compared to bell-wether states like California and Texas (Page, 2011). As Thomas Frank’s What’s the matter with Kansas (2005) famously argues, morally charged wedge issues like abortion and gun control encourage working-class people to support policy regimes contrary to their economic interests. In states like Kansas with traditions of conservative populism, the politics of “backlash” and “reaction” maintain political stasis and stifle progressive social policy (Garland, 2001).

Projected across a conservative populist “rural of ideas,” drug epidemics hold considerable purchase and proffer a shock of danger amid the wholesomeness of the rural. For instance, Frank (2003) finds “big-city” newspapers characterize small towns as sleepy, close-knit places, where doors sit unlocked. The city, on the other hand, is characterized as noisy, dirty, exciting, diverse and inherently dangerous (Weisheit et al., 2006: 15). As constructed, rural meth epidemics bring the crime, violence and “moral poverty” of the city to the final bastion of wholesomeness—rural America.

This storyline thrives, bolstered by accounts like New York Times bestseller Methland: The Death and Life of an American Small Town. Methland’s first pages provide the perfect antithesis to Anderson’s (2000) famous trek down Germantown Avenue in Code of the Street. Sketching an idyllic rurality, Methland’s author, Nick Redding (2009), brings us through Iowa farmland and the tree-lined streets of small towns dotting its landscape—dread floating on the breeze. Redding writes:

Against the oppressive humidity, the night’s smell begins to take shape. Mixed with the moist organic scent of cut grass at dew point is the ether-stink of methamphetamine cooks at work in their kitchens. (Redding, 2009: 6)

Soberly, Reading warns in many small towns across the Midwest, you can quite literally smell meth in the air—an absurdity even for the most drug-plagued neighborhoods. Regardless, the sheer popularity of this book, and many others like it, suggests that the narrative of degraded, collapsing rurality, or as Redding describes, “the death and life of an American small town,” is marketable indeed. Together, nervous warnings of degrading rural life, a tradition of conservative populism and meth’s edifice as a “white trash” “trailer park” drug offer ideal conditions to examine the unfolding politics of populist backlash and criminalization driving the drift toward securitization.

From prison to prayer—citizen to risk

Late 2004, public debates on restricting pseudoephedrine (PSE), a crucial meth ingredient, began. Introducing the preferred technology of control, news reports urged Kansans to follow the lead of neighboring Oklahoma that passed PSE restrictions the year before. The articles warned that failure to pass similar legislation would bring a torrent of meth crimes to Kansas with the “meth heads” who moved north.

Front-page articles with fantastic headlines such as “Meth Makers Flock Here” (Figure 2) conjured images of throngs of meth-addled Oklahomans amassed along the southern border of Kansas, and linked once-mundane cold medicine to the “meth heads” lurking in local communities. Worth noting, several articles carried this cautionary from Larry Welch, then director of the Kansas Bureau of Investigation (KBI):

We’ve tried about everything to fight this plague, from education, prevention, and prison to prayer. I’m pleased with the apparent success those efforts have shown. But in the last few months there have been alarming increases of the reports of Oklahomans coming to Kansas to obtain the precursor chemicals and make methamphetamine here. (Kansas Bureau of Investigation, 2005)

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Figure 2.

From citizen to risk.

This warning is instructive because it demonstrates the urgency of early accounts. Dire warnings of a “plague” resistant to interventions “from prison to prayer” figure prominently, undergirding metaphorical problematizations of meth war (Simon, 2002). Other reports quipped, “It didn’t take a genius to anticipate the druggies would move operations into a more friendly state” (Augusta Daily Gazette, 2005) othering meth users as invading “druggies” crossing the permeable boundaries of a neighboring state—transforming citizens and neighbors to risk.

Shortly thereafter, Kansas Governor Kathleen Sibelius delivered her state of the state address. Laying a particular governmentality bare, Sebelius named meth, natural disaster and terrorism the principal threats to the health, safety and security of Kansas. She warns:

Kansas cannot be a truly healthy state unless it is both safe and secure. All our citizens must feel safe from crime and secure from the threat of terrorism, and feel protected from the natural disasters that have demonstrated their power, both here and around the world, over the past year. Effective protection from terrorism and natural disasters requires the best possible communication among a wide range of government agencies. Using Homeland Security funds, we are well on our way to making sure that first responders—police, fire, and other emergency personnel—can talk directly with each other and can coordinate early warnings, searches, rescues, and relief efforts. As for crimes that affect all Kansans, nothing is more important than stopping the illicit methamphetamine industry in its tracks. Working with the Kansas Bureau of Investigation, the Kansas Highway Patrol, and the Attorney General, I have charged a task force with developing legislation…We simply must make it more difficult for meth producers to obtain the chemicals that they use to concoct their deadly drugs. Oklahoma has already enacted a law that does just this, and I feel confident that we will have strong, effective laws in place by mid-year. (Sebelius, 2005)

Revealing a high degree of disproportionality, the “illicit methamphetamine industry” shown here as seized labs had dropped off substantially every year since a peak in 2001 (see Figure 3). What’s more, the labs found in Kansas in 2004 (191) ranked far behind neighboring Missouri (1,115), Iowa (478) and Oklahoma (427), drawing the veracity of the Governor’s claims into question. ⁶

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Figure 3.

Meth lab seizures 1994–2010.

Despite apparent contradictions, the Governor clearly names meth the chief criminal concern—eschewing child predators, criminal street gangs and other dependable scapegoats. For certain, the “illicit meth industry” is framed as criminal and the domain of law enforcement. Unlike its analog crack, however, meth risks appear more malleable and mutable. For instance, around this time a Kansas Senator introduced federal legislation ⁷ targeting meth’s environmental risks. So, along with usual “drug risks,” meth’s environmental risks draw in special police teams to clean up labs, medical and child welfare specialists and even realtors to deal with homes where labs are found (see Tunnell and Donnermeyer, 2007).

On another front, the widely discussed “Faces of Meth” programme warns of the bodily decay awaiting daring users. Following fear appeal logics, Faces of Meth attempts to deter teen meth use with grotesque before-and-after mugshots of hardcore meth users. Even though many are dismissed as myth, like no other drug, popular discourse elaborates meth’s attack on physical appearance and risks of corporeal decay (Murakawa, 2011).

Most critically, the Governor insists the safety and security of all citizens is contingent on protection from crime, terrorism and natural disaster. Placing meth, 9/11 and Hurricane Katrina on equal footing, the address maps a singular logic. Thus, like anti-terror and disaster relief projects, meth control centers on pre-crime, risk reduction and securitization logics to restrict chemicals and eliminate meth crimes before they occur. With this, the address alludes to fusion of local “police, fire, and other emergency personnel” with the vast bureaucracy of Homeland Security charged with “early warnings, searches, rescues, and relief efforts”—ubiquitous securitization projects indeed.

Much of the coverage early on focused on Senate Bill 27 or the “Meth Crackdown Bill” introduced by Kansas Senate Majority Leader, Derek Schmidt. Despite the dubious efficacy of precursor restrictions (Reuter and Caulkins, 2003) and though authorities could have used a variety of strategies, “cracking down” was the primary goal.

For a brief time the media described the legislation as stalled, with Schmidt scolding, “these folks need to have the courage to say that the convenience of a chain pharmacy outweighs the safety of Kansans” (Rothschild, 2005). Advancing all-too-familiar “with us or against us” rhetoric, Schmidt belittled opposition as a matter of simple convenience, preferred over the “safety of Kansans,” strengthening the link between precursor restrictions and questions of safety and security (Hanna, 2005).

Public debates took a turn, however, January 19, following the murder of Greenwood County Sheriff, Matt Samuels. Initially the media reported, “Samuels was shot around 10 a.m. Wednesday while he was serving a search warrant at a home and an arrest warrant for a man wanted on burglary and theft charges and for violating parole” (Wichita Eagle, 2005). This report is correct. Samuels was serving arrest warrants on 23-year-old Scott Cheever, his cousin, for stealing his parent’s vehicle and violating probation the previous week. A tip later led deputies to a farmhouse where he was hiding. By accounts, Samuels went into the home alone and without his bulletproof vest to try to convince Cheever to surrender. Cheever shot down a staircase at Samuels, killing him at the scene. Though meth was later implicated, it is very important to acknowledge that law enforcement had not sought Cheever, nor anyone else, for any crimes related to methamphetamine.

Despite these facts, a short time later the media consensus was that Samuels “was shot to death while serving warrants at a suspected methamphetamine lab in a rural home near Virgil” (Toplikar, 2005). Though police later found meth-making materials in the home, it is dishonest to present it as a “suspected meth lab” after the fact. To be sure, had the home been “a suspected meth lab,” other warrants would have followed and Samuels would have most certainly had backup and worn protective equipment.

Unsurprisingly, the murder of a respected sheriff at the hands of a meth user immediately untangled the complexities of the meth debate. Echoing lawlessness of the old west frontier, newspapers ran stories with headlines such as “Sheriff Gunned Down,” stirring the fears of an anxious public (Figure 4). Even though two weeks earlier politicians of both parties had voiced serious reservations about the “meth crackdown,” the discussion ceased and turned towards victims like Samuels—powerfully signifying the violent potentialities of the “meth epidemic”(Hall et al., 1978: 225). For small-town folks bombarded by anti-meth campaigns, this death brought big-city crime stories home, along with the realization that criminals in their town murder police as well. Here, meth risks become emblematic of the state’s impotence and inability to protect citizens from the violence and insecurity of late-modern life (Garland, 1996). Later, articulating a “broad grammar for recognizing and rewarding,” Governor Sebelius valorizes Samuels (Simon, 2007: 101):

We owe them a debt that cannot be repaid, but one of the best ways to keep Samuels’ memory alive is to recognize daily the sacrifices made by the men and women of the law enforcement community…We must support them and their families. We do that by giving them good training and good salaries and by passing laws that give them the tools to do their job. (Puriton, 2005)

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Figure 4.

Murder of Samuels.

Clearly, for the Governor, “honoring” Samuels and other fallen officers means expansion of the criminal justice system en masse—as fortified budgets, intrusive legislation, military tactics and equipment. Lost in this sort of plea is any critical evaluation of drug war rationalities contributing to this and countless other deaths. Without critical reflection, such “honoring” begs the practices contributing Samuels’ murder and Cheever’s subsequent execution to carry on uncontested. Writing on roadside shrines to victims of high-speed police chases, Ferrell (2004) makes similar critique of the unflinching willingness to incur any cost in blind furtherance of drug war rationalities. Indeed, as the remainder of the paper shows, Kansas’ war on meth continued unabated following Samuels’ murder.

Managing the terrain

At the same time, another stream of articles reported with dismay that Kansas had dropped from the “top 10 list” for seized meth labs—the first time in a decade. The odd current of disappointment met immediate ridicule from Kyle Smith and the KBI, citing poor record keeping as the explanation. ⁸ “We have to get better stats…The KBI is designed to assist local law enforcement. We don’t want to lean on them unless it begins to hurt funding” (Associated Press, 2005). Interestingly, the KBI offered only faulty record keeping as explanation for the drop, not actual changes in production or consumption. Later under the headline “Shame on us!” local writers offered a retraction, explaining they reran reports of the drop as the “lead story on page 1, because it was a very slow news week” (Sterling Bulletin, 2005). The anonymous retraction documents that meth news is a likely placeholder for media, especially during a “very slow news week” and assumes the official explanations for the drop as fact, citing the lack of accurate record keeping and reporting between counties.

Honoring the fallen—widening the net

Less than a month after the murder of Sheriff Samuels, representatives of the people of Kansas unanimously passed the “Meth Crackdown Bill.” Again, following Oklahoma that named its law after fallen officers, Kansas renamed its bill the “Matt Samuels Chemical Control Act.” The act required that all medications containing PSE be sold by licensed pharmacists, limited how much a person could purchase, required customers to be 18 and to provide valid ID and signature to discourage “smurfing.” ⁹ Indeed, as the quote below shows, Samuels’ death made the bill “impossible to vote against.”

A few weeks ago the bill was limping along…now it’s zooming along, what happened?…Unfortunately the death of Matt Samuels is what happened and it’s the last straw for many people in Kansas who have watched the growth of the meth trade with fear and despair. (Emporia Gazette, 2005)

Acknowledging the significance of Samuels’ murder, the author attributes passage of the act to the “fear and despair” of the “meth trade.” This is likely the case; as the excerpt from the record on the vote shows, Schmidt and others moved quickly to capitalize:

I vote aye on SB 27…It is a necessary step to combat methamphetamine production—with all of its enormous social, health, and economic costs…The Senate also saw fit in this bill to rename the Chemical Control Act as the Sheriff Matt Samuels Chemical Control Act. This step honors the memory of the late Greenwood County Sheriff who was murdered while serving an arrest warrant at a suspected methamphetamine laboratory…My hope is that when historians someday record the story of the methamphetamine scourge Kansas faced during the early years of the 21st century, they will credit passage of the Samuels Act with helping consign that story to history. (State of Kansas, 2005, Derek Schmidt)

Schmidt’s account is more heroic than true, emboldening the narrative of a “scourge” consigned to “history” through the diligence of law enforcement. Rife with war metaphors, the statements etched the distorted account on the official record of the Kansas legislature and nurtured Schmidt’s drug warrior bona fides as avenger of innocent victims and fallen heroes. A short time later, however, Schmidt is less certain, warning, “This isn’t a magic bullet that will make meth go away, but it should put a major dent in meth production in Kansas.” The push and pull narrative of marginal success against continuous risks keeps doors open for continued battles and perpetual war.

Governing through meth

Coverage of legislative activities ran statewide as the 2005 session ended. A long list of wedge issues—sex predators, health care, abortion, death penalty, gun rights, and child pornography—shared space with meth on the pages of Kansas newspapers. Yet despite the perennial importance of these issues, Schmidt named the Samuels Act “perhaps the single most important thing so far this session,” further underscoring the import of governing through meth (Montgomery County Chronicle, 2005).

Implemented July 1, “The “Matt Samuels Act” was deemed a success by early September. According to Smith of the KBI, “We are seeing a distinct drop as the law goes into effect…before you could go down to your smoke shop or truck stop and buy it by the case. There was no restriction on it” (Manning, 2005). These assertions are somewhat misleading, given the federal statutes already controlling PSE (Weisheit, 2008).

Of course, it is highly problematic to claim success for any law less than two months after implementation. Nonetheless, authorities offered “drops [of] 64 percent since new law took effect” as evidence, in context of nearly four years of declines. More importantly, however, recall that just a few months prior, the very same KBI officials disputed these data, citing their inherent flaws. Despite their previous and very public objections, Smith and others now used declining lab seizures as evidence of the legislation’s success and the legitimacy of their work.

Casualties of war

Throughout the year, media coverage of Cheever’s prosecution described him as both a meth-fueled killer and a victim of the “meth epidemic.” Headlines such as “Accused sheriff killer has checkered past” and “Meth addiction plagued accused killer” reflect this odd duality. Placing meth at the root of his downfall, Cheever’s mother pleaded, “Scott didn’t do this, Meth did, he’s not a murderer, if it wasn’t for Meth I know he wouldn’t have done it” (Finger, 2005a). Drawing on personal biography, the articles build the narrative of a “typical” small-town boy, involved in sports and his community, until victimized by meth. From working-class upbringings to “using drugs, disobeying, lying and stealing” to prison, the story reaches its sad yet familiar conclusion.

Importantly, the villain and victim duality intertwines both a troubled small-town boy and his cousin, a respected Sheriff, reminding none are safe from a violent drug that does not discriminate. The narrative also exposes drug war rationalities that attribute all events, such as those leading to Samuels’ murder and the eventual execution of his cousin, to pathologies of drug use. This story begins and ends with meth, as his mother urged, “Scott didn’t do this, meth did.” As we’ll see, the problem with ending the story here is that it leads predictably to “stamping down hard” (Hall et al., 1978).

Reimagining risk

Closing out the year, media declared crack cocaine the “drug of choice” in Kansas. One officer claimed “We were spending so much time on meth, we didn’t have as much time to devote to other cases…Now we’re beginning to devote more resources to crack” (Probst, 2005). Growing from a single article, “crack replacing meth” appeared in no less than 19 newspapers, recast under headlines such as “Crack more prominent in Kansas” and “Crack outpacing meth in Kansas,” generalizing questionable assertions to the entire state and holding remarkable implication for how the public comes to know about drugs, crime and risk. Another officer’s comments, “We’re just lucky we don’t have the heroin cycle in there, like some larger areas do,” perfectly illustrate the cyclical and resilient features of drug risks (Probst, 2005). Because of the overemphasis on meth, crack rises to fill the void. For the uncritical public, drug control becomes a game of “whack-a-mole” where law enforcement barely keeps pace with new threats as they arise.

Finally, late in 2005, part of the controversial Patriot Act, fittingly named the “Combat Methamphetamine Epidemic Act,” imposed PSE restrictions as federal law (Weisheit, 2008). This does not mean the anti-meth regime dissolved or even receded from view. On the contrary, governing through meth is taken up effortlessly from one administration to the next. Moving ahead to 2007, a new Attorney General reinvigorated meth’s specter with Janus-faced warnings of “much work to be done.” He warns:

Despite this great accomplishment, there is still much work to be done to stop the importation and manufacturing of meth and the damage it does to our communities. We cracked down on one source of meth, but we can’t ignore the other sources. For the sake of Kansas families and children, we must put a stop to the production, importation and addiction of meth. (State of Kansas, 2007)

Clearly, if “families” or “children” ever use meth or have opportunities to use meth then more “work” should “be done”—here is where the crisis maintains.

In 2010, the “meth epidemic” appeared in political campaigns, as this testimony from that year’s Attorney General race confirms: “In the Senate, Schmidt led the charge against meth labs, child pornography, human trafficking and Medicaid fraud. He also was the lead Senate sponsor of Jessica’s Law, which puts violent child molesters in prison for life” (Schmidt, 2010). Proving meth’s political expediency, Schmidt featured the supposed “charge against meth labs” throughout his successful bid for Attorney General.

Finally, in 2010, the anti-meth regime delivered on promises of funding, as Kansas was one of just a handful of states awarded a grant from the Rural Law Enforcement Meth Initiative (RLEMI) of the economic stimulus. As part of the RLEMI, leaders developed a strategic plan with several goals to reduce meth use and production. Of the goals, “to increase public awareness” is perfectly indicative of the contradictory rationalities of the anti-meth regime:

Over the last five years Kansas has experienced a dramatic reduction in meth lab seizures… If the public perceives the meth problem in Kansas to be “solved”, it will be difficult to solicit necessary support for funding requests, increased treatment resources, and prevention strategies. (Kansas Task Force Addressing Methamphetamine and Illegal Drugs, 2010)

The goal goes on to describe plans to publicize risks “as new and dangerous meth manufacturing methods such as the ‘one-pot method’ become increasingly prevalent in rural areas of the state.” Clearly, according to the plan, it is necessary to keep meth risks alive in the public’s imagination—if only for funding.

The small swath of history detailed here maps an important period in the local politics of drug control and social imaginaries of methamphetamine. Though presented in linear fashion, it does not suggest the “story of meth” begins or ends here, nor does it suggest these events were plotted deliberately or orchestrated by unseen forces—cause and effect. To divorce the paper from this line of reasoning, we must view these events as the residue of ongoing securitization and governance projects. Thus, we return to Brown’s (2008) “sad paradox” and question how governing through meth continues inaudibly and unrelentingly long after media-driven episodes of panic fade.