“A drug that doesn’t discriminate”: Opioids in Canadian News Coverage
This article relies on the concept of “narrative” to analyze the main mediatized frames that invested meaning in Canada’s opioid crisis. A sample of 400 articles published between 2015 and 2018 was subjected to a rhetorical frame analysis. This led to the identification of four frames transmitted in media articles: prohibitive, medicalized, structural, and sanitary. While each of them encourages a specific understanding of the issue, a transversal dynamic is the change of status of the opioid consumers, who evolved from “criminals” to “victim-citizens”. Our analysis shows that this transformation emerges through discourse that generalize the risk of overdose and addiction and through discursive strategies favoring the identification with the user and his family. This “de-othering” of drug users has a twofold effect: first, it heightens public sympathy and second, it legitimizes decision-makers’ requests for practices of care. It is in this discursive context that the figure of the “compassionate entrepreneur”, the individual who encourages the regulation of drug use by principles of care rather than punitive logics, emerges. More specifically, this figure argues in favor of implementing “harm reduction care”, a concept used in polysemous ways in all frames. Finally, these dynamics of victimization of the user legitimize the framing of this crisis as a “toxic drug supply issue” and highlight, at the provincial and federal levels, the harmful effects of prohibitionist policies which have been affecting marginalized populations for a long time. In sum, we hypothesize that this conceptualization of the opioid crisis is associated with the end of a paradigm and opens new possibilities, namely by allowing ideas of decriminalization and safe supply of opioids to integrate the public discourse.