Policing Methamphetamine Narcopolitics in Rural America [Hardcover]

In its steady march across the United States, methamphetamine has become, to quote former Attorney General Alberto Gonzales, “the most dangerous drug in America.” As a result, there has been a concerted effort at the local level to root out the methamphetamine problem by identifying the people at its source—those known or suspected to be involved with methamphetamine. Government-sponsored anti-methamphetamine legislation has enhanced these local efforts, formally and informally encouraging rural residents to identify meth offenders in their communities.

Policing Methamphetamineshows what happens in everyday life—and to everyday life—when methamphetamine becomes an object of collective concern. Drawing on interviews with users, police officers, judges, and parents and friends of addicts in one West Virginia town, William Garriott finds that this overriding effort to confront the problem changed the character of the community as well as the role of law in creating and maintaining social order. Ultimately, this work addresses the impact of methamphetamine and, more generally, the war on drugs, on everyday life in the United States.

“In this brilliant ethnography, Garriott reveals that as the war on drugs extends from the inner city to rural Appalachia, suspicion and mistrust come to dominate small-town interactions. People one knows and everyday objects are quietly transformed into sources of danger and illegality by the state's desire to root out methamphetamine. A major contribution to law and society studies as well as to rural anthropology.”-Mariana Valverde,author ofLaw and Order: Images, Meanings, Myths This book is an important contribution to the anthropology of drug use...it conveys a real sense of the bleakness and intractability of the problem, as well as the ultimate failure of policy and practice to meet this challenge. -Gilbert Quintero,Anthropological Quarterly