Craft Beer, Local Cheese, and Opiates: The Role of Vermont's 'Idyllic' Landscape in Media Representations of a Heroin Panic

During America’s first heroin panic, opiate addiction was understood as an urban problem; currently this country is experiencing a second heroin panic with a distinctly rural face. Drawing upon moral panic theory and... [ view full abstract ]

During America’s first heroin panic, opiate addiction was understood as an urban problem; currently this country is experiencing a second heroin panic with a distinctly rural face. Drawing upon moral panic theory and sociological literature on drug scares, this senior work examines media representations of Vermont’s heroin ‘crisis,’ exploring how the notion of Vermont as ‘rural idyllic’ is used to define heroin as a social problem. Through an analysis of New York Times articles, I find that the rural idyll is a symbolic middle-class landscape of consumption, authentic production, and purity, against which the heroin addict is constructed as a problematic consumer, unproductive citizen, and contaminant, ultimately becoming a scapegoat for social ills considered anti-idyllic. While in many cases reader participation reinforces these dominant constructions of heroin use and addiction, I contend that the comments section of these articles also provides an interactive site through which participants demonstrate resistance, offer alternative narratives, and give voice to the subjects that are castigated in Vermont’s drug panic. With this finding, I complicate the traditional understanding of drug scares as hegemonic, presenting ways in which new media can be used to destabilize dominant frameworks for defining drug use and the addict.