DRUGS

American Hysteria

W!ZARD Studios

Society & Culture

4.4 • 3.1K Ratings

🗓️ 11 March 2019

⏱️ 36 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

When a security camera caught footage of a 31-year-old Florida resident eating the face of a homeless man, the news and social media dubbed him the Miami Zombie, and it was widely speculated that he was under the influence of a new synthetic drug called Bath Salts, a claim that was later found to be false. Hysterical drug rhetoric has long talked of zombies and monsters and aggressors with superhuman strength and an imperviousness to police bullets, and panic around drug use has long been manufactured by politicians with specific groups in mind, to dehumanize those who appear to cause a threat to the established social order, marking them inhuman groups in need of social control and even long-term imprisonment. Many of us were drafted into the War on Drugs as kids and teens through faulty programs implemented by D.A.R.E. police officers, and taught to mimic this unreasonable rhetoric that has caused irreparable harm to many American communities and continues to do so to this day. American Hysteria is written, produced, and hosted by Chelsey Weber-Smith Produced and edited by Clear Commo Studios Research assisted by Riley Smith Show art by Roache Voice Acting by Will Rogers Thanks to Sarah Deutsch for advising Become a Patron for extra episodes, interviews, and videos monthly! Follow American Hysteria on social media: Twitter: @AmerHysteria Instagram: @AmericanHysteriaPodcast Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Transcript

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0:00.0	Just a heads up that this episode contains references to graphic racism.
0:14.4	On this season, we'll be exploring the moral panics, urban legends, and conspiracy theories that shape our psychology and culture,
0:21.9	and why we end up believing them. I'm your host, Chelsea Weber-Smith, and this is American
0:27.3	hysteria. Drugs known as bath salts being blamed for a gruesome scene in Miami.
0:34.3	This is crack cocaine. It's as innocent looking as can. That it's turning our cities into
0:39.8	battle zones and it's murdering our children. This is your brain. This is drugs. This is your brain on drugs. questions.
1:05.3	When a security camera caught footage of a 31-year-old Florida resident crouched over a bearded homeless man, gouging out his eyes and actually eating his face, the news in social media
1:10.6	quickly dubbed him the Miami's
1:12.5	zombie. At the end of the 18-minute attack, police shot and killed him and then claimed in
1:18.6	interviews that he was most likely possessed by the newest drug epidemic, bath salts. A few years
1:24.8	later, a young man stabbed a couple in their suburban home and then was found by a neighbor eating the face of the husband.
1:32.2	He was largely speculated to have been under the influence of a new synthetic drug called flaka.
1:38.1	The problem was that these two men were not under the influence of those drugs, or any drugs at all, aside from a trace amount of marijuana.
1:47.1	Nonetheless, these stories have become living, breathing manifestations of the worst kind of hysterical
1:52.9	drug rhetoric, of zombies and monsters and subhuman animals, aggressors with superhuman strength
2:00.0	and an imperviousness to police bullets.
2:03.1	The news is a dramatic rolling marquee of drug horror stories, promises that these substances
2:08.7	truly threaten the good sweethearts of the suburbs and the heartland, all while pharmaceutical
2:14.1	versions, almost chemically identical, are marketed for legal consumption to treat
2:19.0	medical conditions. For this episode, we'll see how drug hysteria has long been manufactured by
2:25.0	politicians with specific groups in mind, and how the language around these panics continues to
2:30.6	inform how we think of people who use drugs right up to the present day.
	...

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